What do you get when you mix high school bands with the Global Warming Action Coalition (GWAC)?

Well, at Lexington High School (LHS), you get GWAC Band Night! You may be wondering how music can reduce global warming and the answer is simple: we use the profits from the ticket and food sales for this event to fuel our projects throughout the year. In past years, we have used the money to buy bike racks to reduce LHS’s carbon emissions. We’ve also purchased reusable water bottles to get students to ditch the plastic, which cuts down on CO2 and saves students money.

Since the past few Band Nights had been devoted to bike racks, GWAC figured we needed to find something new to do with our profits…but what? After a few meetings, we decided that we could use the cash from Band Night to buy supplies for our garden. This way, we could fight climate change from a new angle: cutting down the CO2 spent to ship our food from a foreign country to Lexington. The school could eat more delicious and nutritious food grown literally in the backyard of LHS. Or we could even sell some of the produce we grow at the town Farmer’s Market. Band Night would be a great way to raise awareness that the school is trying to start a garden and attract students to help out.

Doesn’t the garden sound awesome? Now that we were all set with a cause, we enthusiastically began the hunt for the perfect date for Band Night. And that’s when we bumped into a pretty significant problem: the date we had usually scheduled Band Night was taken! We decided to reschedule for January and later on, we learned the date we picked happened to be 1) the day before SATs and 2) the day before the school wide dance. By then, Band Night had been postponed a while (from November to January) so instead of rescheduling again, GWAC decided to persevere and go through with the event. Band Night was an annual event and had been successful in past years…it wouldn’t be that hard to gather an audience, right?

For the few weeks before Band Night, everyone in GWAC worked extremely diligently. There were many aspects to take care of, such as contacting the bands who could perform, making sure there was enough equipment for all the performances, baking/buying enough food, and advertising to boost ticket sales. The week before the event, we began selling tickets during lunch. The sales were a bit slow, as some people were unaware of Band Night and what it was. All along, we wondered, are we going to have enough students come? Is the audience going to be as enthusiastic as last year? We hoped the bands had their own fans and could help attract students to buy tickets.

On the night of Band Night, GWAC members met at school to transform the cafeteria space into two stages. After hanging the Christmas lights, setting up the baked goods table, and hanging up our giant poster, we felt ready to get the even started. It was 6:45pm and everything looked so perfect; the only thing that was missing was an enthusiastic audience. All we had to do was wait a fifteen minutes and that’s when people began filing in. For the beginning of the event, I sat with a fellow GWAC member at the door and we sold many tickets. It was so exciting to see the transition between slow ticket sales and to actually being busy at the ticket counter!

A band called “High Voltage” kicked off the event and by 7:30pm, we realized the event was a success. There was a mix of parents and students and everything seemed to be under control. The teacher chaperones were enjoying themselves too. One teacher even like the heavy rock band that performed last! By the end of the night, about 150 people had showed up we had made about $533 dollars – just enough to buy all the supplies we’d need to get the garden going.

From this experience, I learned to never let the odds discourage me. Even if we competed head-to-head with the school dance and SATs, Band Night was indeed, a success. Imagine what we would’ve lost if cancelled the event and didn’t persevere in this situation!

At the end of the day, I only had one thing to say: look out garden, here we come.