Rex Foundation Media Sightings
(January 31, 2025) The star-studded MusiCares Person of the Year ceremony honored the Grateful Dead for their decades of charitable work, creative philanthropy, and showing the way for countless artists along the way. Cameron and Cassidy Sears were there representing Rex, and David Gans and Gary Lambert of Sirius XM’s Tales From The Golden Road joined Cameron for a look back at the band’s days of “inventing a new kind of rock & roll philanthropy.” Listen in…
“We’re part of a community, and so the better the community is doing, the better we’re doing. Jerry always used to say, ‘You get some, you give some back.’ It just makes sense.” — Bob Weir
“That’s that Grateful Dead kind of style, where we just did it because we knew it was the right thing to do. If we wanted to do this the rest of our lives was the idea, we have to do these things, because people support us — and we reciprocate.” — Mickey Hart
(December 5, 2024) Billboard takes a deep dive into the Grateful Dead’s decades of creative philantrhopy as MusiCares honors the band as its 2025 Persons of the Year. Also the enduring effect of that legacy on other artists and their own charitable efforts.
“The model continues to reverberate through a music industry where it’s now common for major artists to have charitable foundations. ‘The fact that all these bands now have looked to that model and replicated it, [the Dead] don’t need to take credit for it, even though it may rightly belong to them,’ Rex Foundation Executive Director Cameron Sears says. ‘They’re just happy that people are doing it. Their vision has had a multiplier effect now around the world. What Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam are into might be different than what Phish is into and is maybe different than what Metallica is into. But together, the amount of philanthropy that’s being generated through all these different people makes an incredible difference.’”
(May 19, 2021) In Relix, The Rex Foundation’s Cameron Sears on the Daze Between, Pete Seeger, and the Grateful Dead’s Righteous Initiative —an in-depth interview encompassing the past, the present, the future, and Rex’s ongoing work.
“When Rex started, we were the first philanthropic organization that was completely interconnected with a rock-and-roll band,” Cameron said. “Now, it’s almost a given that if you’ve had some success and you’re able to put something to the side to give back, you’re following that model because of the incredibly positive outcome of that initiative.”