On a breezy summer night in 2014, after my work on the presidential campaign had come to an end, I stood both at a crossroads in my profession and at a popular Seattle nightclub, there to watch my son’s band perform. The silent debate going on in my head, of what my next career move should be, threatened to take all my attention. I knew I wanted to continue to make lasting social impact. The path I had opted for was to contribute to this through politics, but I was disillusioned at the increasingly divisive nature of the political world. Suddenly, as my son’s band came out on stage, something sparked and all the ideas that had rattled around my brain began to come together. Music is a quintessential unifier. As I looked at the audience, I was reminded of my best experiences while teaching, community organizing and parenting. In those moments, I had seen faces brighten with the realization that what they did mattered–they could make a difference and garner inner power from what they could accomplish.
What if we could harness the bridge-building power of music to improve communities?
What if connecting audiences with their favorite bands and bands with their fans, everyone rallied around a common cause, could transcend ideological divisions and help make people and communities stronger?
This is how I ditched my career in politics and started In Concert with Good. From a pool of the most creative, dynamic people I knew, I carefully selected a team with the skills, experience and sense of wonderment and fun necessary to help create a brand new way of effecting social good. Feverishly we got on the phone, held meetings, and traveled to talk to our friends and new contacts in the nonprofit sector and in the music business; to find out what their greatest needs were. Along the way, we met people from the corporate world to get their insight on their Employee Volunteer Programs.
How could we help get people involved and excited in a way that would benefit nonprofits, musicians and the workplace, along with the broader community?
When we had gotten all the pieces together, we had found a brand new way to connect nonprofits with volunteers and at the same time, strengthen the bond between musicians and their fans. From that we created a Social Purpose Corporation and began our journey creating the social movement of VOLUNTEER RAISING as a way to amplify the success of nonprofits, corporate CSRs and the music industry.
We are pioneers in this field, utilizing our existing and new relationships with people in our stakeholder sectors, to take action with a scalable business model, flexible and adaptable enough to accommodate the ever-evolving social, corporate, and musical landscape and sustain the core values of In Concert with Good as we expand in reach and impact.
Simply put, we built In Concert with Good as a way to capture the “lightning in a bottle” energy that accompanies a tour stop and unleash it in support of good works that empower individuals and strengthen communities.
That’s our story so far…