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FGCU music festival promotes going green and living environmentally conscious lives

EN+Photo+%2F+Allie+Taylor
EN Photo / Allie Taylor

In hopes of building a tradition, the FGCU Office of Housing and Residence Life collaborated with the SG Sustainability Committee to bring a 60’s festival-inspired Wingstock Music Festival to the Veterans Pavilion.

Tuesday evening, students laid their blankets on the grass, bellied up to the buffet serving coconut Thai curry and jasmine rice prepared by Cape Coral-based chef James Fraser, and listened to live music featuring the sounds of  local bands Natural Spirit, Simple Jack, High Five Friday and Briz & Lady.

Uzair Iqbal, the SG director of sustainability, shared the motivation behind partnering with residence life coordinator Jacob McAbee to put on Wingstock.

“I wanted to do a little bit different of a theme,” Iqbal said. “I wanted to focus on something local, something that not a lot of people know about in their backyard. (McAbee) approached me from housing and said he wanted to come up with a Woodstock festival type of idea.”

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EN Photo / Allie Taylor
EN Photo / Allie Taylor

Katie Moran, a member of the community programming committee who assisted in putting on and volunteering for Wingstock, shared that the theme of the event stemmed from Eagle’s Earth Day.

“We really wanted to fundraise for the two big events this year, Dance Marathon and Relay, and we were thinking of events that each of us could share,” Moran said. “It just so happened that one of the events was going to fall on Eagle Earth Day, so we thought ‘Why don’t we take a Woodstock kind of take on it,’ and we just switched it to Wingstock.”

McAbee took the opportunity to make an event previously created, called Liquid Poetry, and revamp it into something that the entire university could enjoy.

“It was an open mic night, and I was like ‘I think I can expand that,’ because there were only about 30 people here,” McAbee said.

This is the first time that FGCU has expanded Eagle’s Earth Day to span over two days.

Monday featured an Earth Day eve screening of the documentary “Cowspiracy,” and Tuesday brought in the bi-weekly Farmers Market, a Tree Campus USA Planting, Recyclemania panel discussion, student-oriented seminar and the Wingstock Music Festival.

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