BGMC’s Membership Tour Committee Co-Chair Tyler Brewer
Tyler Brewer, Co-Chair of BGMC’s Membership Tour Committee for South Africa, acknowledges that participating in our forthcoming South Africa Tour requires a big monetary commitment from individual chorus members. While members certainly get their money’s worth—the excitement of performing, sightseeing and sampling new cuisine in a foreign country, all pre-arranged and booked by ACFEA Tour Consultants —“it’s not small chunk of money to go,” says Brewer.
Recognizing the difficulty some members have in funding such an expensive sojourn on their own, BGMC does everything in its power to ensure that chorus members who want to be on the tour can get there. “We’re not going to leave anyone behind who wants to go,” Brewer says.
At the same time, an important feature of any BGMC tour, including our trip to South Africa, is the ability to donate all of our tour proceeds to community-based nonprofits that work with LGBT people and people with HIV/AIDs in the countries where we tour. (See a complete list of beneficiaries of our South Africa tour here.)
This is why the chorus maintains a scholarship fund to which members can apply to receive money to defray their tour costs. Scholarship recipients also commit to do fundraising for a certain portion of their tour expenses and the Membership Tour Committee provides tools, materials and expertise to help members reach their individual fundraising goals. For example, chorus member Ken Hirschkind brought his laptop to a recent rehearsal and assisted around 17 chorus members in setting up individual fundraising pages on the Crowdrise platform.
The committee also raises money, both for the scholarship fund and to offset production costs for the tour. In March they held a fundraiser at Crudo, where BGMC member Mikey Whalen manages the bar. Whalen let BGMC members serve as guest bartenders, who then donated their tips and profits from select menu items to the scholarship fund.
Brewer was among those slinging the drinks. You can glimpse him on the job in this video.
my head,” he confesses. “I’d never bartended before.” Nonetheless, the guest bartenders raised more than $2,000 that night.
Aside from raising money to support touring members and defray tour production costs, Brewer says the Membership Tour Committee for South Africa overall goal is “just to get people excited about going on tour. And then getting people excited who are not going on tour just to feel connected to what we’re doing and [to give them] ways that they can support their singing brothers who are going on tour.”
If you’d like to donate to our tour to help defray production costs so that as much of the proceeds we raise from our performances go to local nonprofits working with LGBGQ South Africans, you can do so here. Thank you!