Musician David Myles raised over $8600 in Saint John Tuesday for the local food bank.
Canadian musician David Myles made a stop in Saint John Tuesday for an afternoon performance in Brunswick Square.
Myles’ annual ‘Singing for Supper’ concert series raises donations for local food banks as it travels across New Brunswick.
He says he is just doing his part to give back to the community.
“Everybody knows there’s a lot of need. I delivered turkeys when I was 14, and it hit me, it totally shocked me, and I went ‘oh my gosh, there are so many more people living in poverty than we think,’ and helping people is fairly easy for a good portion of us,” he said.
Myles says he wanted to give back to his home province and help those struggling the most. So he and his bandmates came up with an idea.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if we just toured with our own PA, and set up a show wherever we wanted, maybe in malls, and see how much we can raise if we just play. Very simple premise. We play music, people come, they bring donations for the food bank, and that was it,” he said.
“The simplicity of the idea is what attracted me to it. This idea that people could donate, and the food bank would be right there, and they would just take the money and take it back to the food bank. There’s no kind of middle person, and that is important.”
I’m at Brunswick Square right now, where David Myles is playing his annual “Singing for Supper” lunchtime concert to raise funds for food banks in the area. In Fredericton yesterday, Myles raised just over $7,400! pic.twitter.com/aNtsJkIz1K
— Danielle McCreadie (@danimccreadie) December 10, 2019
Myles says when he started the concert series 10 years ago, both the crowds and the donations were small.
Now, he’s raised over $16,000 in only two days: $7,400 in Fredericton and around $8,600 in Saint John.
“It’s really cool to see how it’s grown in every way,” he said.
He hopes that over the years, they will have raised over $100,000 for local food banks
Myles says seeing people be so generous puts him in the Christmas mood.
“You just look around and there’s people with their kids, there’s older people, there’s people who wouldn’t be able to go to a show if it was in a theatre and cost a lot of money. The thing about music is that it really brings people together, and if you can bring them together around a cause that they can understand, that they believe in, like food banks, it works for everybody,” he said.
“I kind of think of myself as being the mobilizer of generosity. It is their generosity, and if anything, seeing people be so generous, it makes them feel good too. They want to give.”
Myles will be in Dieppe Wednesday for his third and final concert of the season.
He says he hopes to be back in New Brunswick next year after he releases a new album in the spring.
