Fumbler's Café

When the Choose Your Charity angle of Sarah McLachlan’s resurrected Lilith Fair Tour was announced late March, some bloggers were ready to pounce. A few had discovered pro-life organizations in the list of non-profits, which could potentially receive funds from this all-female music festival.

Via the Lilith Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/lilithfairtour), the public was able to vote on the pre-selected local women’s charities in their cities until May 3. The top five charities from each city moved on to second round of voting on May 4, which ends at 11:59 p.m. (pacific standard time) on May 31.

Of course, the job of vetting all the charities is enormous, even for one charity, let alone hundreds. Over the year, there have always been stories uncovered through media or criminal investigation about misappropriated funds or other scams. Then, there are simply personal beliefs (ie. anti-abortion, missionaries) that could be a deciding factor in supporting a charity.

“That’s exactly why we’re doing this,” McLachlan tells Samaritanmag. “All of a sudden people jumped on us and attacked us. ‘Well, hold on guys, this is exactly why we’re asking for your feedback. You don’t have to rip our heads off. Thank you for informing us. That won’t be happening.’”

Once informed of policies and practices that go against Lilith or McLachlan’s beliefs, the charity was removed from the list, says the singer.

“We certainly had to deal with the limitations of the fact that though we asked everybody of all different genres of music, we got who said yes and we were limited to that,” relates McLachlan of the event’s typecast beginnings. “So the first year I know we were certainly dubbed ‘the white-chick folk fest,’ which was upsetting to me because that’s not what I meant it to be nor what we were trying to do; it’s just we got the artists we got. With the success of every year, I think it got a little easier for different artists and genres to come on board. [At first] they were concerned about that stigma. ‘This is not going to be my audience. Why would I want to come on Lilith?’ So yeah, that was definitely a struggle, as far as dealing with negativity, but all I can say is we did the best job with the tools we had. I’m sure there’s going to be negativity this time around, but I don’t pay much attention because I like to pay attention to the positive stuff.”

I might fall in love with a woman. I haven’t yet, but the opportunity hasn’t presented itself