(Spencer)– The gates open tomorrow (Saturday, Sept. 12th) for the 2026 Clay County Fair. Manager and CEO Jason Brockshus says just like in previous years, volunteers will once again this year play a critical role in making the nine-day fair possible. Brockshus says some 500 to 600 people will be volunteering to help out with this year’s fair. He says they’ll be serving in a number of capacities…
“In our Mother’s Room and in our information booths and our admissions. We have a lot of folks that volunteer there, but really there’s a lot of people that volunteer at the fair for other nonprofits: the Y group, the Kiwanis’, the Jaycees, the Pork Producers, the Beef Producers, I’m probably missing some, but there’s about 13 nonprofit groups that use the fair really as a fundraising effort. So as long as we as a fair do a great job and bring in an awesome audience, and that means we need to keep spending the dollars on entertainment and bringing in the quality livestock shows and the education stuff, then they have a great audience to sell their awesome food to and do fundraising. And the cool thing about that is, all those volunteers, you know they’re volunteering those hours so those businesses run cost effectively, then their profits, they get to turn right back into Spencer and northwest Iowa for all the awesome things they do for youth and high school kids and disabled folks and all the good nonprofit things. I think that’s something we don’t always talk about.”
Brockshus says the number of volunteers and the important roles they play makes the Clay County Fair unique from others.
