And honestly, it makes better young Canadians.
We are teaching these kids teamwork and discipline and self-esteem, and they walk out of there....
We do these Band Aid celebrations at schools where we actually go in and we'll present a school with a $5,000 or $10,000 grant. Actually, Brett is going to participate in one on May 6 in a school in Bowmanville with us. We're going to deliver 10,000 dollars' worth of instruments to a school there.
It's hard to express unless you've been in the room at one of these, but giving a kid a new instrument and what that does for them is unbelievable. I spent 25 years in the music business as a talent scout signing artists, and I was somewhat jaded. I walked into a school in Halifax with an artist named Joel Plaskett, and we presented these instruments to the school. This one young girl came up to me afterwards and she said, "Mr. Reid, you have no idea what this saxophone has done for me."
It was kind of that classic Glee moment, because these kids were the losers of the school. It was very much an athletic school. We were supposed to have the celebration in the school gymnasium and we were moved to the cafetorium because the basketball team was having a practice. We got bumped in, and it was just the band students, and we had Joel Plaskett with us, who is also a Juno Award winner and well-known east coast artist, and we presented these kids their instruments, and they were like, "Today we're the rock stars of this school. You brought this artist here. You validated our music program. You've told people that we're important."
The other students weren't actually allowed to get into this ceremony. So the band class actually said that whoever raised the biggest amount of food for the local food bank could join the celebration. The school ended up raising—I can't remember how much—thousands of pounds of food for a local food bank, and all that was just through one central piece, which was music.