Aaron Wedra has a line he repeats almost every year in the festival's post-event recap, and it holds up every single time: "It takes an entire undead village to put on an event of this proportion!" The team page backs that up with names, roles and, in a few cases, entire families.
The structure behind the fun
At the top sits Wedra himself, Committee Chair and Event Director, who also designs the site through his own business, Smartz Graphics. Milly Wedra and Gayle Barry run the Marketing Committee. Michelle Weiss, Bonnie Wolstoncroft and Beth Dovi handle Zombie Logistics, work Weiss herself has described as being "our zombie logistics master," managing paperwork alongside Bonnie. Kathy Hemness serves as Zombie Treasurer. Matthew Elliott and Kevin Sitz sit on the Logistics Committee, Elizabeth Lasensky covers Partnerships, and Janet and Russ Gebhardt run the Zombie HQ Team, the desk at Community Park where Kingdom Quest sheets and prizes get handed out.
Lisa Goodin serves on the Zombie Committee, Dave and Lea Rosenberg and Maria Contreras Tebbutt remain Committee Members alongside the roles they hold at NorCal Trykers and The Bike Campaign, and Gary Eberle runs Zombie Security. Sean Davis is listed as Ride Guide.
The bench that makes the day actually run
Then there is the long list of Zombie Ride Assistants, the volunteers who staff the route and the stations on the day itself: Stevie Price, Amy, Diana and Zoe Wilkinson, Sheryl Cambron, Dawn Student, Howie Spero, Dave Reed, Dawn Coder, Nan Klein, Diane and John Steele, Bonnie Walther, and Mary Mallory or Ron Rogers. Zombie Lab Assistants Findlay McIntosh, Sharon Hale and David Siegel round out the technical side, and volunteers Dillan Horton, Carole Gray, Edie Marshall, Greg Tanner, Terry Toy and Evan Bledsoe are named on the team page without a specific title, which around here usually just means they show up and do whatever needs doing.
"It takes an entire undead village to put on an event of this proportion!" (Aaron Wedra)
Fourth Fridays at the Lodge
Planning happens on a set rhythm: fourth Friday of every month, 5 pm, at the Odd Fellows Lodge, 415 2nd St, with a Zoom option for anyone who cannot make it in person, plus pizza, drinks, and custom stickers marking how many years each volunteer has served. The first documented meetings on this schedule ran July 26, 2024 and August 1, 2025. Davis Bike Club has been formally invited to "send a liaison to our monthly committee meetings," a level of openness that says something about how the whole operation is run.
The people who literally lead the ride
On event day, volunteers from The Bike Campaign and Davis Bike Club serve as ride leaders, ride guides and crossing guards along the route from Community Park to Mace Ranch and back. As the festival's own post puts it, plainly: "Without them, the parade wouldn't move!" Simon Pitfield's fencing team shows up early and stays late to help with setup and teardown on top of running their own station, and back in 2020, Pannier Foods fed more than 40 volunteers, a detail small enough to get lost in the bigger story but the kind of thing that keeps people coming back.
By the festival's own description, "dozens of Odd Fellows members sponsor, plan, and help," and "many dozens of volunteers" come in from all corners of Yolo County. Aaron Wedra himself was nominated for "Most Effective Volunteer" in the 2026 Readers' Choice awards, which is a funny kind of full-circle honor for the person whose whole job is making sure everyone else gets the credit.
The Odd Fellows' own values line up neatly with how the festival runs day to day: "Friendship, Love, and Truth," a Lodge chartered in 1870 with more than 60 active committees, and membership open, in their words, "to humans (and zombies) of good character."
Three organizations, one committee table
What makes this volunteer structure a little unusual is that it is not one nonprofit running an event with hired help. It is three separate organizations, the Odd Fellows, The Bike Campaign and Davis Bike Club, sending their own people to the same monthly table, plus a beneficiary, NorCal Trykers, whose staff show up not to be served but to help serve everyone else. Each group keeps its own identity and its own board, but on the fourth Friday of the month, in a room at the Lodge with pizza going cold, they are just the committee. That structure is a big part of why the event has survived a pandemic-era format change, a return to a led parade, three different afterparty venues and a rescheduled hot-air balloon launch without ever losing its core team.
New volunteers are absorbed into that structure quickly. There is no formal tryout, no long onboarding packet, mostly a SignUpGenius sheet and a role that needs a body behind it. That informality is a feature, not a gap: the festival has run this way since 2019 and the roster of names above proves it works.
If any of this sounds like your kind of fourth Friday, sign up to volunteer. Roles range from a two-hour route shift to a full weekend on the logistics team, and the stickers are apparently worth collecting.
