How EN Events, Varvid, Eventage, Course Hero, & The Georgia Ballet are Getting Resourceful to Help Their Own & Others
Since our first article in this series, we’ve received a huge outpouring of support from all of you, so we’d like to start off by saying THANK YOU for being so involved. It’s times like these that we remember why we love this industry so much. For anyone who did not catch our first article, LASSO has been working to compile stories from across the industry of people giving back to their communities and shifting their business to help support others in the face of uncertainty and hardship. Below are a few stories we’ve selected for this edition- stay tuned for more as we continue the series every Tuesday and Thursday.
EN Events: Making Care Packages for Families in Need
EN Events is a full service event planning, consulting, and catering company based in West Hollywood, CA. With over 15 years of industry experience, Elle Nucci brings her keen eye for detail and relentless work ethic to every event the EN Events team produces and every turn her business takes. When everything shut down, the EN team had pre-ordered a number of products for events and campaigns already in motion. Instead of putting them on a shelf until things came around, they decided to create a beverage, snack, and COVID care package delivery service, complete with masks, sanitizer, wipes, and EN Events bandanas for a number of families in the community who were in a tough spot and couldn’t get many of these supplies for themselves. The effort helped their team stay connected, keep busy, and just keep moving forward through this time. And because the need has been so great, EN has kept their staff employed to help with the effort.
Varvid: Providing Streaming Expertise to Keep Events Alive
Varvid is a video streaming and webcasting company whose origins trace back to 2002 when CEO and Founder Aaron Booker used his IT expertise to help his filmmaking friends webcast a local rock concert in Bellingham, WA. When live events started to get shut down in early March, many people in entertainment shifted their focus towards live-streaming; most of whom didn’t have much experience with the technology prior to the pandemic. Since Varvid has been working in the space for the greater part of the last two decades, they decided to give back by extending their live streaming skills to local events that would otherwise have been completely lost this summer. In addition to providing consulting and training for those who needed it, they have also been lending equipment to local musicians for recording and streaming to make sure everyone has a chance to be successful despite the circumstances.
Eventage: Using Their Resources to Host a Virtual Talent Show to Help Out
Eventage is a boutique production company who, in 1998 began in a West Village apartment and has since grown to be a nationally-recognized event and marketing agency boasting long-term staff, client, and vendor relationships. When COVID-19 turned the event industry upside-down and left lots of folks struggling in New York and worldwide, they decided to get together to make a difference by putting on an online Talent Show called “Good People, Great Talent”. The talent show went live on May 1st and was produced by the Eventage team to raise money for their freelance event staff featuring their freelancers’ talents. The event was simulcasted on numerous platforms and they were able to raise $7,000 from over 115 donors. Check out the recording on their website here.
Group Performance for an Eventage Virtual Event
Solo Singer Participating in the Talent Show
Course Hero: Helping Educators Adjust and Donating to Important Causes
Course Hero an online teaching and learning library containing over 30 million course-specific resources contributed by a community of post-secondary instructors and students.
Since the unexpected shift to online teaching and learning in March, Course Hero’s Educator Community Team has been hard at work to create virtual spaces in which educators can come together, learn, share their stories, and support each other.
This July, Course Hero is holding a Virtual Education Summit—a three-day event that serves as a platform for research sharing, presidential panel conversations, campus reopening discussion forums, online teaching demonstrations, learning science workshops, participatory breakout sessions for focused conversations, social events for network building, family programming (to keep the young learners entertained), yoga and wellness hours, musical interludes by emerging student artists, and even a DJ for some virtual move-making. Register to participate free of charge.
In addition to providing educators with free access to Course Hero’s resource library through the end of September, the company has committed $500,000 to much-needed student relief aid, as well as made a $50,000 donation pledge to UNCF, with a plan to donate more as they continue to identify organizations that are doing important work in the fields of education and social justice. Course Hero also partnered with the DEAR CLASS OF 2020 virtual graduation event to support at-risk students.
Georgia Ballet: Assembling Volunteers to Aid Community Healthcare Professionals
Since 1960, The Georgia Ballet has provided their community with exceptional dance performances, unparalleled dance training for all ages, and meaningful educational outreach programming in their local schools. Due to the global health crisis, they were forced to postpone their Spring production and temporarily pause classes through The School of The Georgia Ballet. Even when the challenges seemed insurmountable, their school director decided to assemble a group of volunteers and for several months, they have been making and donating masks to local healthcare workers. They have made hundreds of masks so far and will continue to make more as long as they are needed.
We would love to hear what you’re doing too, so let us know what your company is doing if you’d like to be featured in our next article. We will continue to provide content for the industry to help circulate ideas and some positivity while we all work towards a brighter tomorrow with the values we’ve learned together in these trying times.
