The Morgan Hill Mushroom Mardi Gras festival returned to the Community and Cultural Center this weekend, drawing thousands of visitors for food, live music and celebration of the region’s fungal heritage while awarding $37,000 in scholarships to 35 local high school seniors.
The festival, held May 23–24, has distributed more than $2 million in scholarships to Morgan Hill Unified School District students during its 42-year history, according to organizers.
Most recipients received $1,000 awards. Four students received an additional $500, including two Presidential Scholarship winners hand-selected by festival President Dan Keith and two recipients of the Brad Spencer Memorial Scholarship, named for the festival’s late founder.
“This is the reason we do this Mushroom Festival, for these scholarships, for these young adults,” Keith said. “Myself and the board of directors work all year long on this. We’re all volunteers.”
Recipients are evaluated on GPA, with a minimum of 3.0 required to apply, as well as community service hours and a personal statement. This year’s honorees included a student-athlete with a 5.0 GPA and a student who overcame anxiety disorder while maintaining a GPA above 4.0.
“I hand-select these personally, and some of the money for the Presidential Scholarships comes out of my own pocket,” Keith said.
Morgan Hill Mayor Mark Turner and Santa Clara County District 1 Supervisor Sylvia Arenas presented awards alongside Keith on the afternoon of May 24, with principals from both Sobrato and Live Oak high schools in attendance.
Starting next year, the festival will transition from a common high school application to its own scholarship application, allowing organizers more control over selection criteria.
“We want to adjust some of the criteria so the awards are more evenly distributed,” Keith said.
Beyond the scholarships, the two-day event offered a wide range of attractions. The festival featured handcrafted artist and crafter booths including a live blacksmithing demonstration, gourmet food, live bands at the amphitheater stage, wandering musicians and street performers, and live cooking demonstrations led by celebrity chef Albert J. Hernandez, known as The Untamed Chef.
This year’s festival drew about 80 vendors, spanning arts and crafts, commercial and marketplace booths, and plenty of food, with 40 food vendors offering a wide variety of options, much of it including or infused with mushrooms.
“At this year’s festival, we have a lot more mushroom dishes and mushroom vendors,” Keith said. “There’s mushroom coffee, there’s a lot of mushroom-inspired dishes, there’s mushroom demonstrations, there’s a mushroom garden—a lot of mushrooms here this year.”
Occupying a central position among the vendors was San Francisco-based Far West Fungi, which drew steady crowds to its booth with an extensive display of specialty mushrooms and mushroom-derived products.
A fourth-generation family business run by four brothers, Far West Fungi grows more than a dozen wood-based mushroom varieties ranging from culinary to medicinal, including shiitake, tree oyster, lion’s mane, maitake and reishi, turkey tail—and has even begun experimenting with cultivating cordyceps, a variety that grows parasitically on insects in the wild and presents significant challenges for commercial growing.
“It’s very challenging,” said a Far West Fungi spokesperson. “We grow all of our other mushrooms on the same medium, but cordyceps is something that we keep trying. It keeps our lab fun and exciting.”
Beyond the mushroom vendors, the festival featured live entertainment including Soul Kiss, Entourage and Shane Dwight, a Morgan Hill native now based in Nashville. Keith said organizers are planning to expand the entertainment offerings further next year, possibly adding line dancing.
Keith said attendance appeared to be down, but higher ticket prices—up $5 over last year, to $25 for general admission—and stronger corporate sponsorships helped offset the difference, and they hope to be able to award a similar amount in scholarships next year.
“Last year we sold about 13,000 tickets,” he said. “Hopefully this year we at least reach 10,000.”
Scholarship recipient Ithaca Thai, a Sobrato High School student attending her second festival, said the event reflected the best of the community.
“It’s a really great way for Morgan Hill to give back to the community and the students within the district,” she said. “This is my second year going and it’s pretty much the same as last year, I always really like the food.”
Sunnyvale resident Renee Rico, who made the trip for the weekend, was equally enthusiastic.
“The food was amazing, and the music was good too,” Rico said. “It was fun, it was very chill. The atmosphere was great.”
Preston, a Morgan Hill resident attending for the second time, said the festival exemplified what sets the city apart.
“Compared to other places in the Bay Area, Morgan Hill has a really nice community,” he said. “I just love what Morgan Hill is doing for us with this. Just the whole community, and the food and the vendors—I think it’s fantastic. I love this for our community.”
