Tunes and Trails

Let's get this out of the way first: I don't want your money, I have nothing to sell. This site is here to help musicians and open space preservation join together to promote the common goal of open space preservation. Hopefully tips and articles will help you all on your journey. Now, on to the mission's development:

 

I know what our mission was last week, sort of know today, and have no idea about tomorrow. Let me explain: as Fire In The Kitchen Concerts grew and developed, it constantly changed, taking advantage of opportunities, and reacting to some pretty crazy ideas that I and others came up with. 

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For example, I put a lot of stock in what ice cream socials did for the entire town. (After each show, we'd serve local, boutique ice cream to all the audience members as both a promotion and thank-you for coming treat.) Anyway, I thought it was going to be sort of fun, but it changed people's lives. People would hang out for hours after each show. The musicians loved it as they sold more cd's (remember what those were?) but the big effect was that people talked, face-to-face, and made new friends.

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People met their future spouses. Made families. People met their future careers, made big business connections. Families would bring their little kids to the shows, bribing them with ice cream. We let the little kids sit down in front right in front of the musicians. Some were inspired enough by the awesome talent on the stage to learn an instrument. Some even went in to the music world, a few as performers, a few in the business end.

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We took the concerts outside, not because of some genius move, but because a local farmer wanted to host a gourmet cook-out at a local land trust, hoping to raise a few bucks for the trust, and asked me if I could provide music. It was so much fun, all we do now are outdoor concerts for the benefit of land trusts. 

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We also started bringing in separate elements to make them even more fun; pre-show hikes, yoga in the woods, all sorts of stuff. In the past couple of years alone we've helped raise over a quarter of a million bucks for land preservation. More importantly, we've inspired a bunch of people to help out at these land trusts, or simply learn that hiking in the woods is a blast!

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So what does tomorrow bring? I have no idea. It'll start with more music outside, but then, it's all a guess.