Singer-songwriter, activist and Buddhist practitioner Betsy Rose will perform a benefit concert for the Vashon Resettlement Committee on Friday at the Methodist Church. The event will be staged as a Syrian souk or market with food, handicrafts and gifts made by the Syrian families who live on the island. The market will open at 6:30 p.m. and Rose’s concert will begin at 7:15 p.m.
If Rose had a mantra, it might be something like “music has the power to heal.” In the past three decades, she has performed globally using her voice “to heal and create community.
“Betsy has spent her lifetime organizing community singing for inclusion, justice and resistance,” said her sister Mary Rose, who lives on the island, works at Family Place with the baby box program and is a member of the Vashon Resettlement Committee. “Her music deals with human issues. It inspires kindness, compassion, resistance and healing.”
Besty Rose came of age during the 1960s. Inspired by the protest songs of Pete Seeger, she found her voice as a musician and as an activist, witnessing how music encouraged, engaged and empowered demonstrators, as well as created community.
Since then, Besty Rose has taken her own songs and stories to spots around the world. She’s sung in Washington, D.C., for Code Pink, in Liberia with women warriors of peace and helped to empower women recovering from the sex trade. In 2016, she went on a “music pilgrimage” to Thailand, Nepal, Kenya and Liberia. She walked part of the Camino de Santiago and spent time at Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s meditation center, Plum Village, in southern France. Now, in her home town of Berkeley, California, Betsy Rose has been instigating a new resistance with her Choral Majority.
“Since she returned from her pilgrimage, she’s been thinking about how to make protest effective,” Mary Rose said. “She formed a group called the Choral Majority to bear witness for goodness through music. They sang in Berkeley where the white supremacists gathered (for example.)”
The Vashon Resettlement Committee assists refugee families with housing, language training and job development. On Friday, Betsy Rose will lend her voice to help the committee which helps the island’s Syrian families. There will also be a silent auction.
The committee is a nonprofit entirely run by volunteers. All of the money raised will go to the island families, primarily to pay their rent. The committee currently runs an English as a Second Language class for the Syrian women and is helping them start a catering business.
“It should be a great evening,” Mary Rose said, “with a wonderful person with big life experience who loves empowering people. It will be a chance to show the work of our Syrian families and to support them.”
