Warped Tour Kansas City!

ONE Campaign and Oxfam volunteers at Warped!
Originally uploaded by Brande Jackson

Today Sumner pointed out that we were, as he put it, idiots. We of course accepted this, but when pressed as to what exactly brought him to this conclusion today, he replied that “you came back on for the worst days of the whole tour. It wasn’t even this hot in Texas!” We, unfortunately, didn’t have much oversight or say in determining when we’d be coming back on, if we had we probably would have thought twice. I didn’t think today was as brutal, but it was still pretty intense!



Nonetheless, we powered through the day – getting lots of and lots of fans involved with ONE, Oxfam, and registered to vote, and working with some very cool volunteers as well. Ashley came out and joined us in volunteer for Oxfam, and we had a team of three ONE volunteers: Jordan, Jared and Cameron. Jordan is in high school, and Cameron and Jared are recent grads. They became involved with ONE via their youth Christian organization. All four volunteers braved yet another day of wicked temperatures to talk to their peers about fighting poverty and social injustice. Lately, I’ve been placing a bigger emphasis on the peer outreach factor when training volunteers – what’s particularly cool, I think, about the concert outreach we do, is that we are using music as the unifying factor. Because we are at a show together, we become de-facto peers, something that transcends race and class and gender and age. Because of that, I think, people respond even stronger to what we are talking about than they would in other settings.


Also, I love the catering team at Warped. They got pretty mad at the fact that I guess yesterday people left catering a big mess, and we were all greeted with this sign:



For the record, my mom raised me to pick up after myself, so I can proudly say I was not one of the guilty ones – I even go out of my way to recycle…