In an effort to take action against climate change, the Earth Day Springfield Festival organization will be hosting its first music festival in downtown Springfield.

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The event will be one-day and will feature nine popular local bands on Saturday, April 23. Organizers say it will be a plastic-free, leave-no-trace event to promote sustainability awareness.

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The festival, whose full name is The Earth Day 2022: A Plastic-Free Music and Sustainability Festival, will be held in the backyard of Mother’s Brewing Company on Grant Ave from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m.

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The local line-up includes the headliners The Hillbenders along with SALT, Izabel Crane, Molly Healey String Project, The Burney Sisters, Justin Larkin, Brandon Moore, Abbey Waterworth and Avery Mann. There will also be a special aerial performance by Springfield Aerial Fitness. There’s more information about the artists on the 2022 Earth Day Festival website. 

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The Earth Day Springfield Festival’s goal is to donate 100 percent of the ticket sales to the environmental organizations — the Watershed Committee of the Ozarks, James River Basin Partnership and Ozark Greenways.

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Tickets are $25 before the day of the event and kids 12 and younger get in free. Tickets are available for purchase through Mother’s Brewing Company and Eventbrite. There will also be tickets available at the event for $30, cash only. 

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Mother’s beer will be available for purchase in commemorative cups and there will be one-to-two food vendors. The outdoor festival will proceed through rain or shine and tickets are non-refundable so they strongly suggest watching the forecast and bringing rain gear and layers if needed.

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The event organizer, Molly Healey, has felt a call to take action against the urgent issue of climate change for a long time now. 

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“So much so that, at one point, I was contemplating quitting music to take up some sort of environmental work full time,” Healey said. “But after much thought, I realized it would not only be bad for my mental health to quit something I love so much, but also I could meld the two passions together for more effect. I have always loved music festivals and festivals in general, but it always saddens me to see the staggering amount of plastic waste that is generated at some of them. I wanted to show that it is possible to have a large-scale event without all of the waste and raising money for local organizations was a way of helping my corner of the world amongst an unimaginably large crisis.”  

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Its mission is to raise money to keep the local environment clean and sustainable in an effort to keep Springfield “on pace with the rest of the world as we adapt and change to new expectations,” according to the event’s website. “The first Earth Day was marked as the birth of the modern environmental movement; we look to the 50th anniversary as being our pledge of commitment to keep that movement strong.”