This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Vans Warped Tour: a music festival that will take place in over 40 cities across the U.S. where crowds of activists, punks, musicians and angst-filled youth will spill into amphitheaters and onto blacktop parking lots. This is a festival of sound and spirit, a melting pot for rebels and culture makers. Warped Tour isn’t your average tour, it’s a mentality. Like Fridays. Count us in.
We’ll call Warped Tour home this Summer for the 9th consecutive year, hitting the road once again with Bayside– Warped Tour Vets + some of the best guys around. There’s an undeniable energy at Warped, and we’ve been fortunate to join the community packed with artists and storytellers.
Warped Tour is a great opportunity to volunteer with Invisible Children
We’ve made close friends, both with bands and organizations. Those relationships have helped us achieve some of our craziest goals… like when Katy Perry tweeted to help us win the Chase Million Dollar Giveaway. We’ve grown alongside To Write Love On Her Arms over the years at Warped, and our friendship with Thrice, who have raised over $100K for our programs, deepened over those long Summer days. We bonded with All Time Low and Yellowcard at Warped, which opened the doors for us to tour Europe with them in 2011. There’s been others we’ve partnered with too because of this tour, like Aarron Gillespie, who performed at our Rally on the White House lawn. Kevin Lyman, the festival’s founder, is a true innovator and friend. His support for Invisible Children, along with darlings Kate Truscott and Allison Skiff, in the face of criticisms after the Kony 2012 campaign was honestly life giving. What we’re saying is– we can’t imagine Invisible Children without Warped Tour. And honestly, we don’t want to.
Warped Tour 2008, The first time I volunteered for Invisible Children. I’m raising the roof in the IC shirt behind IC’s Artist Relations Manager (gray zip-up/coolest haircut) , Alex Collins, and IC Alumni Jaymie Shearer with the backpack (before she became a Roadie)
At each stop on the tour we’ll be looking for two volunteers to join our team and work alongside our IC roadies.
It’s an opportunity to have some incredible conversations, work hard, and most likely make some lifelong friends. You can apply to volunteer here.
To get a great insight into the life behind Warped Tour check out the documentary ‘No Room For Rockstars‘ or this short video we made back in 2012:
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