Art and activism meet on Amy Martin's "Stepping Toward Justice" Tour

PABLO Ñ On Friday, October 6, singer/songwriter Amy Martin will kick off her "Stepping Toward Justice" tour in Pablo on the Salish Kootenai College Campus. The concert will be held at 7 p.m. in the Michel Building and is free and open to the public. Amy, in collaboration with the Montana Human Rights Network, will be touring the state of Montana in support of the initiative to raise the minimum wage in Montana (I-151) and to promote the release of her seventh album, Bind Me to Free. The tour will take Amy through Pablo, Bozeman, Anaconda, Kalispell, Hamilton and Great Falls. Amy's music serves as a vehicle for political action - a personal and interactive approach to social justice work.

This collaboration with Amy Martin is just one part of the Network's commitment to work on issues of economic justice using the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as its framework. Raising the minimum wage in Montana is a first step toward the goal of economic justice for all. "Paying poverty wages is an issue of morality," said the Network's Co-Director Christine Kaufmann. "No one who works full-time should be forced to live in poverty. On November 7th, voters in Montana have the opportunity to make a statement that every Montanan should be able to feed their family by voting yes on I-151 to raise the Minimum Wage."

Amy's artistic commitment is deeply entwined with her social commitment. "We are inundated by songs stripped of any community consciousness," she says. But on the other extreme, we are sometimes assaulted by songs, which righteously insist that we agree with their take on the world's problems. I'm trying to carve out a third path, in which listeners are invited to empathize, to get inside someone else's situation and imagine how it might feel."

The concert will be held at the Michel Building on the Salish Kootenai College Campus at 7 p.m. on Friday, October 6. For more information on this event, please contact Kim Abbott at 406-442-5506, ext. 15 or kim@mhrn.org.