After years of volunteer efforts with the Wilderness Trail Festival, the Kiwanis Club of Christiansburg will formally become owners of the event.

The festival, formerly coordinated by the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce, is an annual family event in downtown Christiansburg featuring food and merchandise vendors, arts and craft booths and entertainment.

Kiwanis members met with chamber President Shane Adams on Monday afternoon to discuss terms of the transfer. They reached a verbal agreement, and next a written contract will be processed outlining specific details.

Christiansburg Town Councilman Ernie Wade, a Kiwanis member of 37 years, will serve as chairman of the transition committee. He said he looks forward to the event becoming an asset for the club.

"We are an organization that likes to do things for the community, and like most other organizations are looking for ways to make funds," Wade said.

He said any profits from the Wilderness Trail Festival will go toward local programs such as filling backpacks with nutritious food for children in the Christiansburg Head Start program, making improvements to Kiwanis Park and hosting a children's Christmas party.

The Kiwanis have been volunteering with the festival for years, Wade said. Every year club members would mark spaces for vendors the night before its opening and show up at 5:30 the next morning to help direct traffic and provide other services, he said.

So when they heard the chamber was interested in allowing a community-oriented group to take ownership of the festival, they jumped at the opportunity.

Adams said the chamber had been discussing the idea of relinquishing control of the festival because its members wanted to see somebody else do it justice.

"We've been talking about it for years now. It kind of stagnated under us because we have so many other things that we have to concentrate on," Adams said.

He said the chamber's main priority is to put together programs and initiatives that benefit its members. The amount of resources the chamber has been putting into the festival outweighed the benefit that it provided to members, so having another group run it would allow the event to better serve its purpose, Adams said.

The chamber will help the club market this September's festival to local businesses. In future years, the chamber will turn full control over to the club.

Wade said the Kiwanis plan to run this year's event identical to how the chamber did to get their feet wet and from that point will analyze what kind of improvements can be made. Adams said the club will have the chamber's full support.

"We're looking forward to a cooperative relationship with the Kiwanis, and we want the festival to grow," he said.