Posts Tagged ‘Bob Weir’

14 Oct

Wear Your Music

Posted by Andrew Mersmann in Inspiration. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Holiday gift ideas are starting to creep up…just like merchandise in stores…waaaaaaaayyyy to early. Remember when Halloween came and went before twinkly lights and fake snow filled the shelves? Now the glowing embers of the Fourth of July have barely cooled before Santa stakes out a corner of a store. This gift idea, however, is a perennial, and would make a great birthday, graduation, anniversary, etc. gift while also doing some profound good.

Wear Your Music gets guitar strings donated by some of the greatest rock and roll players in the world (Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Pete Townsend, Bonnie Raitt, Carlos Santana, etc) and then crafts the strings into simple bracelets. 100% of the profits from this oh-so-simple enterprise, go to the musician’s favorite charity of choice. Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, for instance, chose Reverb, a non-profit focusing on musicians and fans taking a stake in a sustainable future. Peter Frampton chose the Music Resource Center of Cincinnati. Jason Mraz profits go to the Surfrider Foundation. Clapton—Crossroads Drug Rehab. Dolly Parton—Imagination Library. Santana—Milagro Foundation, and so on.

It is a great way to embrace music and further the charitable goals of the artists you respect (and find a whole bunch of new foundations and charities as well as you peruse the website).

18 Jan

Martin Luther King, Jr—Day of Service

Posted by Andrew Mersmann in Inspiration, volunteer. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

Today is MLK Day, and it has also become our national Day of Service. It is a day to honor the Right Reverend by embodying what he held above all else—people reaching out to others. The theme of the movement is “MAKE IT A DAY ON, NOT A DAY OFF”

Doctor King said so many notable things in his addresses to crowds, including: “We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service relationship to humanity.”

Celebrity “Ambassadors of Service” like Usher, Bob Weir, Edward Norton, and many others are helping get the word out that today is a day to get busy. Need something to do? The website for the day: www.mlkday.gov has an easy feature where you enter your zip code and can find listings of volunteer projects needing your heart and hands today.

With Haiti sitting so heavily on our spirits, it is important not to succumb to charity burnout. People are giving and giving and giving, money and prayer and meditation and volunteer effort. As the saying goes, Nobody ever grew poor from giving.