Chain Reaction’s Food and Music Festival will hold its third annual fundraiser benefiting the March of Dimes Foundation this weekend.
The free event will be held on Saturday from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Tioga Town Center, located at 105 SW 128th St. in Newberry, Florida.
Anna Hochberger, a UF graduate and a March of Dimes youth coordinator, said the event is free but recommends a $5 donation to go toward the charity.
The event has popular restaurants and food trucks catering the event, including Monsta Lobsta, Pappa Pineapples and Turnpike Mike’s, Hochberger said, along with five musical acts that are set to perform.
Hochberger said Chain Reaction is a national youth council that helps raise funds for the March of Dimes.
The Alachua County team consists of about 26 high-school students from varying schools committed to raising a collective, yearly goal of $50,000.
“They call themselves the baby-savers,” Hochberger said. “They are very, very passionate about this.”
The March of Dimes began under the Franklin Delano Roosevelt presidency to cure the polio virus when FDR asked the public to march their dimes to Washington to help fund research, she said.
The mission changed to premature birth and birth defects once the polio vaccine was discovered.
Florida has a more-than-9-percent rate of premature births, which is higher than the national average, Hochberger said.
Gidon Herman, a music instructor at Studio Percussion, said both of the bands he plays with, Bound & Determined and The What, will be playing at Saturday’s fundraiser.
The bands are considered educational groups, which means they don’t receive money for performances.
The ages of the band members playing at the event range from 14 to 66 years old.
Herman said this will be the second time both bands have played at the festival, and he was happy to have been asked last year by the festival’s coordinators to play at the event.
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, guys, we got to do this,’” he said.
The What will play at 7 p.m., and Bound & Determined will play at 8 p.m.
Stephen Langer, a Studio Percussion volunteer and The What band member, said he has been with the organization for 10 years.
Studio Percussion placed an ad looking for someone to play bass with its student-house band, the 66-year-old said.
“And I thought, ‘Well, I can do that,’” he said.
The idea of a nonprofit music school was new at the time, Langer said.
He wanted to get involved because the people were interesting and the organization offered services to kids who may not have the opportunity otherwise.
“They have a professional experience of what it’s like to be in a functioning rock ‘n’ roll band,” he said.
The band plays a mix of rock music, including Led Zeppelin, Ozzy Osborne and Three Doors Down, and Langer enjoys being able to share music he considers significant to his younger band members.
“I get to play music with a 14-year-old kid,” Langer said. “How cool is that?”
