JazzReggae Festival

As the economic situation of our nation continues to deteriorate it seems that our already failing education system is falling even lower on the list of priorities. And as funding gets cut to schools, arts education programs are always the first to go. However, music and art is necessary more now than ever. Our nation's diversity is continually increasing but recent events have shown that this diversity has brought about higher levels of ignorance and intolerance. We, the students of the JazzReggae Festival staff, believe art and music is the means by which to bring people together and promote community and tolerance. A survey taken at last year's festival gave us the following demographic breakdown of the attendees: African-American (21%), Asian (12%), Caucasian (31%), Latino (21%), and Other (15%). When comparing that with the demographic breakdown of Los Angeles residents it is clearly visible that our festival truly brings together a level of diversity far beyond that even of the Los Angeles population. Entering into its 25th years, the JazzReggae Festival at UCLA is well-established as one of most unique, and well-renowned music festivals on the West Coast. We bring together some of the most influential artists from around the world, blending music, art and culture in a way that has facilitated true community gathering. The festival was also one of the first festivals to take a stance on producing a sustainable festival. For the past 3 years, the JazzReggae Festival has dramatically increased its efforts to reduce its impact on the environment. These efforts have included using the UCLA CoGeneration Power Plant - 80% energy efficiency, using both natural gas and landfill recovered methane gas - to power our stage and vendor booths, implementing an extensive waste management and monitoring scheme, providing a highly interactive sustainability education area in partnership with student and community organizations, furnishing monetary incentives for our food vendors to provide biodegradable/compostable food service items, and providing water-refilling stations with the sale of reusable, aluminum water bottles. Our goal every year is to reduce our carbon and ecological footprint even further.