Music festivals are a staple of the summer season.

Spending time outside, listening to bands you love, and maybe discovering some new artists you've never heard.

And a new festival on the block aims to do all that while also doing some good along the way.

The HollerGirl Music Festival provides a showcase for Appalachian female musicians, all while supporting a good cause.

[music playing] HollerGirl is a three-day music festival.

We focus on women's empowerment by having a lineup of three full days of music that is completely all female.

And then within the festival perimeters, we focus on healing, we create a safe space, and we focus on raising awareness for two domestic violence organizations, which are GreenHouse17 and Oasis Farms.

I'm a survivor of domestic violence a couple of times over, unfortunately.

My grandmother was a survivor, so that's really what this is about, focusing on healing.

What's more healing than music?

So, it all kind of comes together that way.

GreenHouse17's primary mission is working with survivors and their families who've experienced intimate partner violence.

And our programming really is whatever that family might need to move from a place of crisis to self-sufficiency.

So, we serve 17 counties.

That's the name of GreenHouse17.

We're in central Kentucky, so we're all the way down to like Danville and Harrisburg area and all the way up to Nicholas and Harrison County.

So, actually, it was HollerGirl that reached out to us.

I think this was a critical piece for Kristen when she was kind of devising HollerGirl.

I think she has some experience herself with intimate partner violence and sadly so many women in Kentucky have had experience either firsthand or a family or friend.

And so, we would say probably one in three or one in four women experience intimate partner violence.

I think what we loved about HollerGirl, and I think what is similar to GreenHouse17, is that she really wanted to focus on the resiliency of women, the artistry of women, and the powerful voices of women, and I think that was really critical to us at GreenHouse.

Our first name was Bluegrass Domestic Violence Program.

We really wanted to shift that attitude of victimization and a low self-esteem and lack of empowerment and go, these women are strong.

They are survivors.

They have lived through things, and people can come through that in lots of different ways, and music is a really critical piece to that.

I think any time that there is an opportunity to celebrate women while also empowering women, you know, I'm on board for that all day, every day.

And it's such a special thing to be a part of where women are coming together and they're being celebrated for their experiences, for their stories, and what they have to offer, and then at the same time they're helping women who are in situations that aren't great, that they're trying to better themselves, and, you know, anything that I can do, anything that any of us can do to help with that, I'm gonna be on board with that.

[girl singing] ♪ I'm just a poor girl ♪ Nobody loves me So, HollerGirl is two years old.

Year one, I saw their flyers online, and I had wanted to be involved in what GreenHouse17 was doing anyway, just in my own personal life, and so I saw a music festival led by women partnering with GreenHouse17, and I was like, "Oh, those are my people."

And I went year one and just bonded with so many of the women who are involved immediately, and one of our board members, Sarah Blue, saw my Facebook videos after the festival of me singing and told Kristen we just have to have her next year, and so they asked me to play, and it was just a privilege.

You know, it felt like being seen by people that I really admired in a way that I don't think I had felt seen before.

When you go to these other shows, you see a lot of incredibly talented men.

I have so many male musician friends that I think are just stellar, but I wanna see those women up there too because they are incredible.

They're equal, you know, and we just don't get to see that.

And I think bringing that to the forefront and saying, "Yeah, I've got three full days of these of women."

That's three full days of music that's all women, mainly within this Appalachian area.

That's incredible, you know, and I had to turn down some women.

So, next year we're gonna keep building.

We're gonna keep bringing new people to the forefront and bringing in other, you know, bigger artists that are more interested and, you know, we're just gonna keep going with this and fighting it.

There is a community of men and women that really wanna support this issue, and it doesn't have to be just because I've experienced it, and it doesn't need to be private and it doesn't have to be, "Oh, that's just, you know, sort of between you and your friends or family," but we are all in this together.

And if someone has experienced abuse or violence and not living to their full potential, this matters to everyone, and artists are just wonderful at magnifying that and kind of putting a spotlight on that, and it just helps, I think, the rest of the people that are attending and showing up and being present at a beautiful venue.

We tend to get a bad rap that we're all petty and catty and it's all competition, but it's really not.

When you get in these settings where there's this common mission of bringing women together, it's magical and it's powerful.

And I truly believe that it has the ability to change the world and change lives.

[music playing]