To Write Love on Her Arms Benefit Concert raises $500
Four performers rocked the Broadway Theater Thursday for a cause dear to Chantell LaForest's heart.
Ryan Anderson, Rival Summers, Mark Daisy and Ben Schuller and several others performed at a benefit concert Thursday to raise awareness and money for To Write Love on Her Arms, its headquarters for rehabilitation and for the IMAlive hopeline. The event raised about $500 with between 60 and 70 people attending.
To Write Love on Her Arms is a nonprofit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and also invest directly into treatment and recovery.
"This organization for me is very personal; it saved my life when I didn't have anything else. Therefore, this is my way of giving back," said LaForest, an Escanaba junior. "I am a survivor of sexual abuse, depression, attempted suicide and just a lot of things that To Write Love on Her Arms deals with. I really want to make it known that there is help out there — even if there isn't someone physically there — that there is an organization there for them."
The concert was the sixth concert Rival Summers performed in for this cause. Summers, from Sterling Heights, is a pop artist who lived his story on stage.
"All of the songs from my up-and-coming album are kind of inspired by the idea of living my story," Summers said. "Those songs are my story."
Summers told a story about how he drove around from flower shop to flower shop looking for flowers for his girlfriend, then when he became desperate, he stopped and asked a neighbor woman if he could take a flower from her garden. He then sang a song about that situation. This was a part of his story.
"I got involved with TWLOHA because I had become bored with the regular class work and I wanted to do something different," said Traverse City junior Kayla Duran. "My favorite part of TWLOHA is actually running the events. I've been through a lot and I can really relate to many different things."
Oxford junior Elizabeth Moore said the benefit concert was a great event for a great cause.
"In high school, one of my friends committed suicide. She was a runner and we all got on the track and wrote messages on balloons and sent them to her wherever she may be, and this was the beginning of the healing process for some of us," LaForest said. "These are some of the things we do in To Write Love on Her Arms"
