A Look at One Foot's Non-Profit Collaborations:

The Apollo Spring Gala 2017 & Music for Changing Times

While One Foot Productions may be best known for producing big-name events like the NBA All-Star Weekend, the VMAs, and even the 2016 Democratic National Convention, there’s another side to our work that’s smaller in scale, but no less important to our mission of cultivating inspired collaborations and telling meaningful stories. Over the years, One Foot has developed close creative relationships with many non-profit and arts organizations that work to promote positive social change, support emerging artists, and strengthen local communities. Working with non-profits to produce live events that raise awareness even as they entertain comes with its own set of creative and logistical challenges. Fortunately, we at One Foot love ourselves a challenge—especially when it’s for a good cause.

This year, One Foot had the opportunity to produce live fundraising events with two of our favorite non-profit collaborators: the Apollo Theater and Music2Life. At the historic Apollo, we put together an entertaining, spirited Spring Gala that celebrated the groundbreaking legacy, lasting impact, and bright future of the cultural epicenter. With Music2Life, we developed and presented Music for Changing Times, a landmark multimedia benefit concert that brought together a diverse lineup of emerging and legendary activist-artists. While they were very different in terms of style and structure, both events celebrated the arts, community service, and incredible storytelling—all of which we happen to be super passionate about.

The Apollo’s Spring Gala was helmed by Kamilah Forbes, the theater’s new Executive Producer. This year marked Forbes’ first year in her new position, and she knew that she wanted the inaugural Gala of her tenure to be a fresh and entertaining event that would energize and inspire the entire Apollo community. When she approached One Foot with her ideas for the Spring Gala, we knew right away that we wanted to be a part of the action.

“One Foot doesn’t do cookie-cutter productions,” Forbes says of choosing us to produce the Apollo’s Spring Gala. “What they offer is much more a la carte… I wanted to elevate this event from previous years, and One Foot was crucial in helping me figure out what could be done differently.”

We began working with Kamliah and the Apollo from the moment the concept for the Spring Gala was established. Our objective was to produce a tented party and evening concert that not only kept people entertained, but also encouraged them to support the continued work of the theater. We got to work writing a script that could pull off this particular double duty—but we knew we’d need an excellent host to strike just the right tone. Ultimately, we didn’t just book any entertainer for the job, but the Entertainer. Cedric, that is. Our material was a great match for Cedric the Entertainer’s voice, and his pitch-perfect performance kept the audience engaged and entertained all night long.

Producing live events for the purpose of fundraising is a unique task. You want to put on an incredible event that inspires the audience of potential donors, but you also have to find creative workarounds to make sure that the budget is nice and reasonable (the goal is to raise funds, after all, not deplete them). But at One Foot, we’ve spent years learning how to be adaptable, resourceful, and innovative around this particular challenge. We’ve learned that a few key A List elements can bring an event to the next level without breaking the bank.

“There are very specific needs for an event like this, that is at once a fundraiser and an evening of entertainment,” Kamiliah Forbes confirms. “Not every company could adapt to such a specific kind of production. Not every company can work across all those forms, speak all those languages… but One Foot just gets it.”

One Foot’s decade-long collaboration with Music2Life is built around that same spirit of creative innovation. Music2Life works with different groups to create music-based programs that motivate engagement and inspire enthusiasm for the work of socially conscious groups. In the past, One Foot has helped Music2Life produce award shows, corporate programs, and artistic presentations for advocacy groups. Liz Stookey Sunde, who founded Music2Life along with her father Noel Paul Stookey (of Peter, Paul, and Mary), understands that live performance has the potential to impact and audience long after they leave an event…if you approach it in a way that is authentic, active, and specific.

“May there never be a wasted captive audience,” Sunde says. “You don’t need the biggest celebrity to do some crazy benefit concert that saps all your money. You can deliver a program of meaning where people will come back to you year after year because they understand your organization now, and they want to be a part of your growth and your mission.”

Our most recent collaboration with Music2Life was Music for Changing Times, a benefit concert that amplified the organization’s mission of fostering social change through music and supporting the emerging activist-artists who are working to cultivate that progress on the ground. The concert, Music for Changing Times, capped off a week of programming around music for social change, hosted by the Rubicon Theater Company in Ventura, California. Our goal was to put on a show that captured the spirit of Music2Life while actively employing its core values and practices. This event was an opportunity for us to demonstrate Music2Life’s mission in real time, to really walk the walk… and walk it we did.

Music for Changing Times was built around a group of emerging and established activist-musicians whose works spans decades, genres, and causes. Our artists included:

Tem Blessed, a socially conscious hip-hop artist who raps about everything from climate change to police violence.
Naima Shalhoub, a Lebanese-American artist who has combined her passions for music, social justice, and education in her work with incarcerated women.
Decora, a Hudson Valley hip-hop artist and mentee of Pete Seeger whose music combines a folk music ethos with a drive for social change.
Aisha Fukushima, a vocalist and founder of the RAPtivist project whose music tackles environmentalism, racial justice, and immigration reform (among other things).
Noel Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow, founding members of the legendary folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, and longtime advocates for social justice in their own right.

With these artists’ music as our guide, we built a script that paid homage to the legacy of music for social change while celebrating the work of artists currently on the front line. Touching on the vast, nuanced ideas of Peace, Environmental Justice, and Equality, Music for Changing Times was one part tone poem, one part call to action, and an all-around incredible evening of song, poetry, and storytelling. The final moments of the show saw all of our musicians performing on stage together in a joyful celebration of music’s power to not only change hearts and minds, but leave us feeling a little more connected to our global community.

“For us, having the credibility and being in partnership with One Foot is huge,” Sunde says of our ongoing collaboration. “It’s the foundation upon which we can build many of our significant shows. The people at One Foot are so smart, and so sensitive, and I think we complete each other in a lot of ways when we’re doing these projects. Our values, our work ethic, our customer service orientation, and our tolerance for risk is all the same.”

Establishing partnerships with nonprofits that share our values is a key element of our work at One Foot Productions. We love working with the big guys to produce large-scale blowout events, but we’re equally invested in the work of small, mission-driven companies who are out to make the world a more inspired, connected place.