Community Impact Jams At Earl Hall

When Alan Papir, SEAS '09, and Alish Erman, CC '09, got onstage to perform their emo song during Earl Jam on Nov. 17, they were afraid they might be taken seriously and booed offstage.

"We were basically mocking overly sentimental emo songs," Erman said. "We were surprisingly impressed that they actually liked it, [but] we wanted everyone to have a good time."

To top it off, Erman went on to play the theme from Zelda on the piano, eliciting even more laughter.

The pair's performance, along with others that ranged from the spoken word to piano improvisation, demonstrated exactly what Community Impact hoped for in hosting Earl Jam-diversity.

In keeping with this aim for diversity, the group, a nonprofit umbrella organization that oversees almost all of the campus volunteer programs, wanted Earl Jam to be more than just another open mic night. The six members of Community Impact's Student Executive Committee, which was in charge of organizing the event, contacted CU Records, a campus record label that helps promote student musicians.

With the label's help, Community Impact put together what they called an open mic showcase, meaning that the first half of the two-and-a-half-hour Earl Jam would be purely open mic, while the second half would feature four of CU Records' artists, including Supraliminal, the stage name of rapper-beatboxers Dan Smith, CC '09, and Anton Glamb, CC '07, whose atypical style might be classified as electronic pop funk, according to CU Records President Ra-Sun Williams, CC '07.

"He's [Anton] a very dynamic performer," said Williams, who also hosted the event. "That's why his fan base loves him. He's as fun as he wants to be."

To add to Earl Jam's variety, Community Impact External Affairs Officer Sabrina Hawkins, SEAS '08, asked Onyx, a dance troupe, to perform as well.

In planning the event, the community organization also collaborated with the Office of the University Chaplain, which is hosting an open mic series that spans the school year. Coincidentally, the chaplain's office was already planning to hold its second installment of the series in Earl Hall on the same day as Earl Jam, so the two decided to combine their projects.

In several ways, Earl Jam's diversity also served to bring together different groups, from the three campus organizations that planned it, to the approximately 25 acts that it featured, to the 300 or so people who attended it, although only 200 were allowed in at any given time.

The committee members saw this as analogous to what Community Impact tries to do.

"We just want to bring together our volunteers and the wider community," Hawkins said.

"There's a constant struggle to connect the programs that everyone knows about to the larger community," said Community Impact Secretary Allie Feldberg, CC '08.

According to Feldberg, the problem for the organization is that so many people know about the over 25 volunteer programs that it coordinates, from America Reads to Habitat for Humanity, but they don't realize that they're all unified under Community Impact.

To promote this recognition, the group said they hope to plan more events like Earl Jam, such as an art festival and a summit for all 9,500 volunteers affiliated with the organization. Those projects, though, are still in the brainstorming stage.