Philly Myco Club announces mushroom festival with hikes, market and speakers

Philly Myco Club has announced the Third Annual FUNGADELPHIA Festival as “a day dedicated to MUSHROOMS,” and the lineup is aimed squarely at people who want more than a casual browse. Mushroom hikes, a mushroom market, mushroom specialist speakers and a mushroom-themed parade put species ID practice, local contacts and beginner-friendly learning in one place.

The club behind it is not a pop-up interest page. Philadelphia Mycology Club says it is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2018 by Bethany Teigen, with a mission to study, collect and document fungi, foster accessibility, diversity and inclusivity through community education, and steward land while advocating for fungal conservation. Its homepage calls the group “fungi for everyone since 2018.”

That matters because the best mushroom events do more than entertain. Guided hikes can show how seasonal species appear in habitat, and a market puts attendees in front of local growers and makers instead of leaving them to sort through internet photos and secondhand advice. Specialist speakers can tighten up identification habits, safety judgment and ecological context in ways that a one-off lecture rarely does, especially for people deciding whether to begin foraging or how far to trust a field guess.

The club’s earlier festival listings show how broad the event format has been. The first annual Fungadelphia Festival was listed as free and ran Sept. 7, 2024, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. A Humanitix listing described that edition as a free celebration of the community through a shared love of fungi and included guided walks, table talks, mushroom ID, culinary workshops, mushroom-focused food trucks, yoga, tincture making, mushroom log making, speakers, live music, mushroom crafts and local makers vending mushroom goods. The second annual festival returned to the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education on Aug. 23, 2025, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and was also free.

The club keeps that education moving between festivals. It holds monthly cleanups at Cobbs Creek Park on the first Sunday of every month, and it arranges forays outside the city through its socials or the Friends of PMC Facebook group. The organization also says it works with other environmental groups in and around Philadelphia to provide free and accessible mushroom guidance in an urban setting.

FUNGADELPHIA fits that model: a full-day mushroom gathering that turns foraging from a solitary hunt into a local network, with the practical payoff tucked into every hike, table talk and speaker session.