Hey everyone! Amy here, from Reverb – the environmental NPO that works with musicians to make sure they’re rocking in an eco-friendly way.
I just returned home from a few weeks working with Passion Pit on our 7th Campus Consciousness Tour. I wanted to share a few photos from the road, and tell you about a typical day in the life of a Reverb Onsite Greening Coordinator (fancy title, yeah?).
First of all, we couldn’t do all of this work without the support of the band and crew. These guys and gals were great, and really got into everything from recycling to interacting with students and environmental issues on campus. So, what was my role in all this? I (and in this case, my awesome colleagues Elliott and Davis) made sure that the tour was as green as it can be.
First task of the day was making sure recycling and catering areas had all the right things going on. We set up recycling stations in catering, the production offices, and all the band and crew dressing rooms. We recycled all that we could (cans, bottles, plastic, aluminum, paper, you name it) and put up signage to make sure people knew where they could recycle. During this time we also checked in with catering to see if they were using disposable or reusable plates and silverware. If needed, we replaced any plastic ware with biodegradable corn and potato starch versions (these will biodegrade in just 45 days!).
Then, one of us would hook up with the venue contact to check out where our Eco-Village would be set up. After working through any space issues, we brought our road cases over in preparation for the evening set up.
On this tour, we also worked with students to do some non-partisan voter outreach during the day. Around noon we headed over to the student center with our partners Rock the Vote and Trick or Vote and worked with student volunteers to collect voter pledges for a couple hours.
Oh yeah, and while we were at UNH we sampled some yummy Stonyfield yogurt! Check it out:
Volunteers “scaring” out the vote with Trick or Vote:
Afterwards, we had a little downtime to tally pledge numbers and get ready for the evening. For each concert we set up an Eco-Village where students could complete a number of actions in order to enter a raffle to win a chance to meet the guys from Passion Pit after the concert. This time around we featured a photo booth, a Ben & Jerry’s Fair Trade prize wheel, an Eco-Hoops basketball game, and also invited environmental student groups from each school to table with us and reach out to their peers about important happenings on campus.
We’d run our village for a couple of hours, until Passion Pit took the stage, and then would break down for the evening. After the show, we took our volunteers and raffle winners to meet the band, collected recycling, and got ready to do it all again the next day!
On this 12-date tour, we collected nearly 3,500 voter pledges, sent in almost 2,500 postcards advocating for Fair Trade products on campus, and took over 1,000 eco-pledge photos! Want to learn more? Check out our site (http://www.campusconsciousness.org) or Facebook page here.
Visit The Green Room for a behind-the-scenes look at more bands going green. And stay tuned for more posts from Amy.
What green concert initiatives have you seen?
