MISSION

Our mission today is to recognize and celebrate the international influence the NATO Command in Norfolk, VA, and its 28 member nations, brings to our city. Festival events include education programs for our children, cultural events to engage all citizens, and opportunities to empower our industries.

FESTIVAL HISTORY

The Norfolk NATO Festival is the longest continuously running Festival in the Hampton Roads region, and the only one of its kind in the United States which honors the NATO Alliance and its member nations.

In 1951, the Women’s Club of Norfolk and a number of Norfolk’s garden clubs embraced an idea espoused by Fred Heutte, the city’s Superintendant of Parks and Forestry, to promote the city’s floral beauty through an annual Festival.  Named the Norfolk Crape Myrtle Festival, it took place in Stone Park, located at the north end of The Hague, in the heat of the August sun.  However, after the 1952 Festival, city leaders reconsidered the Festival’s theme and season, settling on a spring time Azalea Festival to highlight the emerging beauty of the one-hundred acre Norfolk Azalea Gardens (now called Norfolk Botanical Gardens) near the city’s airport.  This Festival was to be modeled after a Festival of the same name in Wilmington, N.C., by bringing a Hollywood starlet to Norfolk as a Queen, along with other celebrities to make appearances. 

In 1953, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) established its first and only Command in North America, Supreme Allied Command, Atlantic, in Norfolk, Virginia. Aligning the city’s Azalea Festival with the newly formed NATO command helped it to stand out from the multitude of other azalea festivals in nearly every state south of Mason-Dixon line.  One year after NATO’s arrival, the citizens of Norfolk renamed this event the International Azalea Festival, which served the dual purposes of a salute to the allied forces and celebrating the beauty of the city’s gardens.

In the more than 50 years since its inception, the Festival has developed into a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, which produces numerous cultural and educational events that are attended annually by thousands of people.  In 2009, the Festival changed its name again to the Norfolk NATO Festival.  Its goals include creating new friendships, providing a basis for cultural exchange, recognizing the military's role in maintaining peace in the world, and pursuing new lines of trade between Norfolk and the world.

Today, the Norfolk-based NATO command is known as Allied Command Transformation (ACT), and serves as the think tank or futures organization for the Alliance.  In 2009, NATO celebrated its 60th Anniversary, with 28 full member nations and 24 Partnership for Peace nations as part of the Alliance, providing an ever-increasing and dynamic international community here in Hampton Roads.