Carmel: What is Conscious Alliance all about?
Conscious Alliance: We’re a non profit organization that brings together art and music and doing the good deed of helping people that need help. The primary cause that we work with through a lot of our stuff in Colorado is the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. It’s one of the poorest concentrations of people in the United States and in 2005 we built a barn there that stores all the food we collect. We take the donations up every six to eight weeks but Conscious Alliance is basically trying to give food to anyone who needs it. We have provided well over a million meals to those in need. We will go to different food banks and anywhere that can use the help. When on the road, like when we are at Summer Camp, we try to give back to local food banks any way we can.
How do artists support the cause?
A lot of the artists we work with will create pieces of art and then donate it. Then we collect non perishable food items in exchange for each limited edition poster. People can pick up the art at the actual shows or buy online with all donations going towards our cause. The bands will do things like sign the artwork or make an appearance at our booth before or after the show, sometimes they will even do both! Two of our biggest supporters have been the String Cheese Incident and STS9. For Summer Camp we have a signed poster of Umphrey’s McGee that an artists named Jay Miller created. It is a one of a kind piece that festival goers can buy a raffle ticket for where the winner is announced on the last day of the festival.
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Conscious Alliance’s Raffle Art at Summer Camp 2014[/caption]
How did the organization get started?
Well, Justin Baker was a student in Boulder in 2002 and had an interested in providing food to those in need. It was kind of a project of his and he started bringing in bands to support his cause. Then he started working with String Cheese and it just blossomed into this amazing organization from there.
So are you all volunteers?
There are four main people in the office that work year round and then we have people like myself who will volunteer to go to shows or festivals to help us collect food items or donations.
How did you get started working with Conscious Alliance?
I was actually in college… I saw a poster at a festival and it intrigued me. So that is how I first found out about Conscious Alliance. From there I started donating and noticed they posted a position online for volunteers. And I was like, “I would love to spend some of my free time working with these guys.” I signed up to volunteer at festivals over a six month span. It is really a volunteer thing. Like I was already coming to Summer Camp so I asked if they needed any help.
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