HeadCount Blog

Time has indeed been flying by here at HeadCount – we are a month into our touring season, but it feels like we’ve been on the road forever!

Over the past month, we’ve had teams on the ground and on the road with the Dave Matthews Band, Jack Johnson, Pearl Jam, and Ratdog. We are about to hit the road with John Mayer, O.A.R. and STS9 in the upcoming weeks as well – there will be plenty of opportunities to volunteer, so do be sure to sign up to do so! It’s the work of the amazing volunteers who come out to see us night after night that has helped us register thousands of fans over the past month!

Our first leg of Jack Johnson wrapped up in Minneapolis about a week ago. We came just shy of getting 1,000 people registered to vote over our first five dates, and recruited several hundred new volunteers as well – we hope to see you all out at a show soon! Jack himself has been super supportive – coming out to greet our volunteers on a few occasions, and even giving us a shout out from stage in Minneapolis! We’re pretty eager to get back out on the road with the All At Once Tour once it comes back to the US in August.

Our Dave Matthews team is still braving scary weather, but they are pulling through – we haven’t even hit the halfway point of the tour and have already gotten over 3,000 DMB fans registered to vote! Our touring crew even got a chance to meet Dave, and were pretty pumped by his support and interest in our work.

Pearl Jam is wrapping up their tour tonight in Boston – Amanda, our HeadCount touring rep is tired, but still sad to see the tour end! We are wrapping up with close to 1,200 Pearl Jam fans registered to vote and committed to hitting up the polls this November. Shout outs from Eddie have also been a nice bonus along the way!

Our Ratdog team of Sara and Lizzy got started in Oregon last week. They are on a west coast run, having already hit up Eugene, Seattle, Boise, Salt Lake City, Sacramento and Los Angeles. They have a few more stops before their tour wraps up in Northern California next week, and have gotten several hundred Ratdog fans registered to vote along the way!

Be sure to check back for more updates from our on the road teams, and you can check out more tour photos here. And don’t forget, we need you to VOLUNTEER! Sign up today!

Beginning July 1st, the first phase of largest college aid expansion in six decades kicks in, according to a release sent out from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. This was part of the number of bills pushed through Congress in 2006 when the New Direction Congress rolled into town.

In efforts to help middle class families live more affordable, the House passed, among other things, a minimum wage increase as well as the the expansion in college aid which includes an expansion of Pell Grants as well as this reduction in interest rates which will cut in half by 2011 and will begin with a drop from 6.8% to 6.0%.

According to the release

“This cutting of the interest rate will benefit the 6.8 million students who borrow need-based federal student loans each year. Once fully phased in, this interest rate cut will save the typical student borrower – with $13,800 in need-based student loan debt – an average of $4,400 over the life of the loan.”

Thanks to the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, which provides more than $20 billion in federal student aid over the next five years, interest rates on need-based (subsidized) federal student loans will drop from 6.8 percent to 6.0 percent on July 1st – making these loans more affordable for millions of low- and middle-income students. This is the first of step towards halving these interest rates – over the next few years these rates will continue to decrease until they reach 3.4 percent.

Low and middle income students and families benefit most form this plan as 6.8 million students borrow need-based federal student loans each year.

other benefits they can begin receiving this fall. For the 2008-2009 school year, the College Cost Reduction and Access Act will also increase the Pell Grant scholarship by $490 (raising the maximum award to $4,731) an provide up-front tuition assistance of $4,000 each year for students who commit to teaching high-need subjects in high-need public schools.

Just wanted to let everybody know that HeadCount ended up registering 1,145 people this weekend at Bonnaroo. This was a record breaking weekend for HeadCount and a sign of how far the organization has come.

We are extremely proud of all the volunteers that came out this weekend. We had an incredible team of 9 of our best volunteers. It was also extremely moving to see people who had already payed for tickets come to the booth, grab a clipboard and help us out.

While the HeadCount volunteers worked hard canvassing out in the campgrounds, stages and tents; the booth also received a great deal of traffic. People were determined to find our tent and register. This was a great example of how motivated young people are these days and a sure sign that the live music community will be well represented at the polls come November.

Headcount is back out at Bonnaroo this year in full action! In addition to our all star team hitting the ground and registering voters – we’re at 700 currently, getting dangerously close to our 1000 goal – Headcount co-founder Marc Brownstein has also been on site and was featured on a panel on Friday.

Our team in Mansfield includes Shane, our RC for the Midwest, Dan, our RC for the upper Midwest, Dan’s brother Gabe (who, is, we understand, engaging in some friendly competition with his brother when it comes to registrations…), Andy, Stacey, Kelly, Jennifer and Celeste – all volunteers from the Nashville HC team, and Jessica, HeadCount’s Regional Coordinator from the south. We are also joined this weekend by members of HeadCount’s core national team, and by members of our touring teams who have stopped by to help. It’s been a lot of fun to get to work with such awesome people, and to talk to countless fans about the importance of voting and ways that they can get involved with HC.

More updates coming soon – and more Bonnaroo photos can be found here!

The past few weeks have been busy here at HeadCount – our volunteers have been hard at work in their communities registering lots and lots of voters, and our touring teams have hit the road in full force, getting hundreds of people registered to vote and involved with HeadCount along the way!

Erin, Ashley, Stephanie and Ethan are our Dave Matthews Band touring team for the first leg of the tour. They got started two weeks ago in Pittsburgh and have been braving rainstorms, heat and long drives ever since. Bad weather hasn’t gotten them down though – they’ve gotten well over a thousand people registered to vote just a few weeks into the tour and are getting more and more people involved every night! They’ll be in Hartford this weekend, and working their way to Darien Lake and Boston next week.

Our Pearl Jam tour kicked off this week in Florida. Amanda is our touring rep, hitting the road with the band in style as a part of their touring crew! Her and her volunteer teams got the tour off to a great start in Palm Beach and Tampa, getting hundreds of PJ fans registered to vote and informed about Headcount. A big ‘register to vote with Headcount’ shout out from Eddie Vedder was also a nice bonus and unexpected surprise for us!

Also hitting the road this week was our Jack Johnson team of Nicole and Johanna. They got their tour started in Indianapolis, braving rain with their hard core volunteer crew and getting over a hundred Jack fans registered to vote on their opening night.

Joining our touring teams on all of these dates are local Headcount volunteers – our Team Leaders, Regional Cordinators and local volunteers, all of whom are coming out in full force and really helping us get thousands of people registered this summer.

We’ve got lots of dates ahead of us – check back here often as ‘on the road updates’ will start to roll in, check out our photos here, and be sure to sign up to volunteer if you haven’t done so yet!