Dear friends, I am greeting you from a sunny South Africa. I just want to say a very, very big thank you to all of you who have been involved in organizing this concert. Thank you, Sam. Thank you, all of you who have been collaborators with Sam – the technicians, the musicians, the artists. Ultimately we are family, we belong together, we can survive only together. We can be prosperous only together and we can be human only together. God bless you.” (March 25, 2006)

- Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and patron of Tygerberg Children’s Hospital of South Africa

Producer's Summary:

"The Wilbraham & Monson Academy REAL Concert is a student effort to help the 'Global Family.' It is to benefit the Tygerberg Children’s Hospital of South Africa as well as assist the Katrina Musician’s Relief Fund sponsored by Harry Connick, Jr. I was inspired to produce this concert by my correspondence with leading patron and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu."

- Sam Greene, Producer, WMA '06

Through music in an old vaudeville concert hall, the WMA REAL Concert will help in the present and resonate in the future. It is an effort, through music and dance entertainment, to provide support to our American family in the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast, as well as to reach out a helping hand to our neighbors abroad who are in need. If students, with help from their families and teachers, can organize a concert, then through my school’s entrepreneurial and globalization center we can encourage other students in other schools to do the same.

Wilbraham & Monson Academy is an independent coeducational college preparatory middle and upper school for boarding and day students in western Massachusetts. Students and teachers from throughout the United States and around the world live and learn in a caring and supportive community, enriched by its 200-year heritage of inclusion. For that reason, WMA is serving as the sponsor for the REAL Concert.

Feedback on the WMA REAL Concert:

"I have been happy to serve as a consultant from First Night to the WMA REAL Concert and am very much looking forward to attending it on June 10, 2006. The entertainment and mission sound fabulous. It is especially wonderful to see young people use the arts to help each other and for humanitarian purposes. I applaud this student effort and encourage people to support this concert."
- Geri Guardino, Executive Director of First Night Boston

"I am very pleased to see American students reaching out to people in
need both here in the United States and in Africa. It is not only the
grand strategies that facilitate change but also individual efforts like
this concert, that bring hope to people throughout the world."
- Joel Lamstein, President of John Snow, Inc. (JSI) & World Education

"This fundraiser demonstrates the very real power young people have to effect positive change through social action of their own devising. I applaud the organizers for focusing their compassion, initiative, and energy on the human tragedies of poverty, disease, and displacement whose ubiquity makes them all too easy to ignore. We would all do well to learn from their example."
-Leon Botstein, President of Bard College

For more information, questions and comments, please direct correspondence to:

info@wmarealconcert.com

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