Lilith Fair backs socially responsible enterprises

Casey Verbeck

The i4c Campaign (“i4c a better tomorrow”), in partnership with the 2010 Lilith Fair, in late April plans to award socially conscious enterprises with much-needed growth capital.

The original pool of 100 potential recipients has been narrowed to 10 finalists that are working to meet triple-bottom-line goals by focusing on people, planet and profit.

“There’s a true lack of capital resources for these change-making companies,” says Casey Verbeck, founder of the i4c campaign. In addition to “educating and inspiring” the general public, a major goal of the campaign is to provide a platform where businesses can get additional capital resources and awareness that they wouldn’t have gotten before, according to Verbeck.

One of the finalists that stood out to Verbeck is Better World Books, a business that repurposes used books from public libraries and universities that would otherwise be thrown away by selling them online to fund literacy initiatives locally, nationally and around the world. The business has saved over 30 million pounds of books from landfills.

Between 1997 and 1999, Lilith Fair raised more than 10 million for various charities, according to Lilith Fair co-founder Terry McBride. However, the financial support ended once the annual tour did.

“I wanted to make sure this time around there was some self-supporting ecosystem that could keep that system going once we wrapped Lilith Fair again,” McBride says. “We did such great work then, and when Lilith Fair stopped, so did that great work. I see it as a lost opportunity. This time around ... our goal is to do a number of investments through the i4c to create a return to follow 100 percent into our charity efforts.”

Lilith Fair, which is one-quarter owned by Sarah McLachlan, plans to contribute $1 from every ticket sold for the 2010 Lilith Tour to the Lilith i4c Campaign. ABC, which is the official media sponsor of the 2010 Lilith Tour, is also a sponsor of the campaign.