lights on the lawn

Conventional wisdom says getting down on a dance floor can be a healing experience. In this case, that’s literally true.  
In the spring of 2011, Teddy Raskin was a sophomore at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Student life was treating him and his friends well until a close buddy of his, Luke (who requested his last name not be used to protect his privacy), broke his neck in a boating accident after jumping off and hitting a sandbar, fracturing two vertebrae.  

The friend group was devastated by the accident. The good news was that with rehabilitation, Luke could relearn how to walk. The problem was that the machine he needed to do it cost $90,000 and wasn’t covered by insurance. But Raskin saw a way to make it happen: a splashy dance set on the campus lawn.

“Instead of just asking people for money for this machine,” says Raskin. “I thought we could put on a concert to raise the money and do it in the spirit emblematic of Luke, ourselves and the University and turn tragedy into a celebration of life.”

Raskin had already been hosting events around town and had always wanted to put on a dance show in Nashville, a city not necessarily known as an electronic music hotbed, especially in 2012.

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So he started hustling, asking fraternities at the school to each pitch in between $500 and $1,000 for the event and also agree to not throw their own party on a fall Friday night set aside for the show. While Raskin says Vanderbilt was “a bit terrified” about letting a bunch of fraternity brothers throw a dance show on the Alumni Lawn, the chancellor and other officials ultimately agreed to let it happen, even making it possible to purchase tickets through student ID cards.

Meanwhile, through friends of friends, Raskin made connections at the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, which focuses on curing spinal cord injuries. 

They just needed a DJ. Raskin’s sister worked in the mail room at WME, and a good friend worked at NUE agency. With their help, he reached out to agents. “I was asking for Afrojack for like, $10,000 and Swedish House Mafia for $20,000,” he says. “These agents were like, ‘Did you leave a zero off the offer letter?’”

Ultimately, the house duo White Panda signed on to play. On Oct. 18, 2012, more than 1,500 students gathered on the Alumni Lawn to see them play, with the show making $96,000 through ticket sales and donations. Within the year, Luke was walking again.

With this, Lights on the Lawn was born. Taking place each year since that 2012 debut, the show is now a staple of the Vanderbilt events calendar. Over the years, it’s hosted marquee dance acts including The Chainsmokers, Diplo, Afrojack, Oliver Heldens, Two Friends, Loud Luxury and Louis the Child, simultaneously expanding to become a training program that teaches student organizers from Vanderbilt the ins and outs of the live events industry. 

This year’s Lights on the Lawn happens tomorrow (Sept. 27) with headliner Gryffin, who was originally one half of White Panda and has since gone on to have a massive solo career. The lead up to the show now includes Lecture on the Lawn, which this year featured execs including Kris Lamb of Big Machine, Az Cohen of 300 Entertainment and Alessi Nehr Alessi Nair, the general manager of Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheatre speaking to students about getting into the business.  

More than 500 students have gone through the program, with many of them getting jobs at Live Nation, Wasserman, WME, CAA and Spotify, along with banking firms like McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.  

“Vanderbilt’s a very competitive university,” says Raskin. “If someone’s passionate about music, this gives them a path to [learn about] producing, promoting, marketing, putting on an educational series, then going to get a job at one of these places.” 

With the original need that inspired Lights on the Lawn solved with the first show, in 2013 the event started sending 100% of its profits to East Nashville’s Mary Parrish Center, which provides domestic abuse survivors short- and long-term housing. The organization was chosen in the wake of a case that rocked the Vanderbilt campus in 2013, when four football players were accused of raping a student, which ultimately resulted in each of them being sentenced to prison time.  

Donations over the first three years made it possible for the Mary Parrish team to purchase the building they’d been renting. “This was in 2015, right before things started getting insane as far as the cost of housing in Nashville,” says the Mary Parrish Center’s executive director Mary Katherine Rand. “It was such a gift that we were able to purchase it at that time.” The organization, which was founded in 2002, has been able to completely renovate the facility with subsequent donations from Lights on the Lawn. Other donation money has paid salaries for the facility’s resident therapists, with Vanderbilt students also volunteering at the facility. Rand says that annually, Lights on the Lawn is one of the biggest donors to Mary Parrish.  

Over its first 11 years, the event has raised roughly $850,000. And this year, even those who aren’t attending can make donations through the Event’s GoFundMe. 

After graduating from Vanderbilt in 2014, Raskin himself went on to work in the resale department at Ticketmaster for three years, starting in 2017. That year, he thought to ask the company to sponsor Lights on the Lawn, and it was suggested to him that he email Michael Rapino directly to ask for the money. He did.  

“I didn’t expect a response,” says Raskin. Within 48 hours, however, Rapino wrote back. Raskin can still recite the email word for word.  

“Dear Teddy on behalf of myself and the entire Live Nation family, we’re so proud of you,” the note went. “However, we are in the business of getting partnership checks, not writing them.”  

“My heart went through the floor. I thought I was going to get fired,” Raskin recalls. But Rapino’s email continued.  

“He said, ‘This show is so amazing. We are so happy to support. [COO Mark Campana] will reach out to you, and we will be writing a check for $50,000.”  

The email came through when Raskin was with his parents on the way to a Lady Gaga concert at Wrigley Field. “I started crying in the cab,” Raskin says. The $50,000 sponsorship from Live Nation helped propel Lights on the Lawn to its best year ever, yielding $171,000 in proceeds and driving 2.1 million digital impressions and nearly 4,000 tickets sold.

In terms of music, agencies and DJs have also generally been generous, with artists typically playing for discounted or highly competitive rates. “No one’s out there trying to win over their top offer with us,” says Raskin. “If you’re coming to play Lights on the Lawn you know three things: One, it’s going to be a well-produced, well-attended show. Two, it’s an unbelievably impactful show. And three, you’re not going to get your Lollapalooza booking fee.” 

Raskin, who now lives in New York City and is the CEO at KOACORE, the supply chain company he founded during the pandemic, says he’d love to expand Lights on the Lawn to other college campuses, a move he foresees being beneficial for nationwide charities and student bodies at large.  

“You have all these educational experiences, you have this blowout concert, you raise a bunch of money, you have a sick time, and you get to learn,” says Raskin. “That’s what our deal is.”