Tens Of Thousands Of Dead & Company Fans Took Action On This Year’s Summer Tour [Stats]

Earlier this month, Dead & Company wrapped up their 2018 summer tour with a fantastic tour closer at Boulder, CO’s Folsom Field. The two-night stint in Colorado capped a 24-date, nationwide summer trek that brought in thousands of fans each night. In addition to the music, each concert featured a Participation Row, the traveling “social action village” which incentivizes fans to engage and take action with various charitable organizations and non-profit organizations. Co-organized by two music-minded organizations—nonpartisan voter registration group HeadCount and environmental non-profit REVERB—Participation Row has been part of every Dead & Co tour dating back to the band’s debut in Fall 2015.

Dead & Company has now released the final tallies from their 2018 summer tour Participation Row, and they show that fans were eager to participate. Over the course of the tour, Dead & Co fans took over 22,000 actions with the various social, environmental, and political initiatives on Participation Row.

More than 6,000 new voters were engaged in the political system. Fans who took action with three non-profits at Participation Row received a numbered, limited edition VOTE pin, designed in the style of the famous “LOVE” sculpture, but with a Steal Your Face skull as the “O.” Over the duration of the tour, more than 6,000 of the pins (donated by Deadhead-run NYC accounting firm Schulman Lobel) were earned by fans for their Participation Row activism. In partnership with Nalgene, more than 4,000 reusable water bottles were distributed on Dead & Company’s summer 2018 Participation Row, preventing the use of more than 20,000 environmentally harmful disposable plastic water bottles. In addition, D’Angelico Guitars once again donated a number of custom instruments which were signed and auctioned off to raise funds for the various organizations participating in the endeavor.

Notes Headcount executive director Andy Bernstein, this summer’s Participation Row brought in more than $120,000 for its participating charities, including March For Our Lives, Wavy Gravy’s SEVA, the Rainforest Action Network, the Owsley Stanley Foundation, and many more.

“Everything about Dead & Company Participation Row is amazing,” says Bernstein. “The fans, the organizations, the partners and of course the band are all completely behind it. We were mobbed with people every show.”

While Dead & Co tour is now over (save for two nights at LOCKN‘), HeadCount and REVERB have several more Participation Rows lined up at various events in the coming weeks, including The Decemberists‘ Traveler‘s Rest festival in Montana, the long-running Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, and LOCKN’ in Virginia.

For more information on Participation Row, or to see how you can get involved, check out HeadCount’s website.