Music filled Denver Community Church on Friday, May 19 as a 17-person band raised money for cancer research and food security.

Bailey Thomas, a Kent Denver School senior, spearheaded the charity concert and is planning to go to University of Southern California for bass guitar next year.

Thomas has been playing the bass for around five years now.

“This whole event was kind of a brainchild of mine,” Thomas said. “Just to really get out there and do something with what I’ve been loving to do.”

Thomas created this band with peers he has played with before and named it “World Domination.” Greeley-based indie-rock band Stone Jackals was their opener.

Thomas said the most difficult part about the planning process was writing all the music.

“I wrote and arranged all the music,” Thomas said. “The band is about 17 people, and it’s an eight-person horn section.”

Working with such a large band was a challenge. Thomas said not everyone fit in his garage for rehearsals, so they had to split up into sections until a few weeks prior to the concert.

It took Thomas around six months to arrange music from different R&B artists, including Bruno Mars, Aretha Franklin and Earth, Wind & Fire.

All proceeds from the concert were split evenly and donated to LuvFromLily and Western States Cancer Research.

Thomas was inspired to donate to these organizations after one of his friends was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, a kind of cancer that affects the immune system.

“It’s kind of put into perspective how important a lot of this stuff is,” Thomas said. “I wanted to do something to give back a little bit.”

Another one of his friends, Andrew Derwin, also a Kent Denver senior, lost his mother to metastatic pancreatic cancer in 2020. His mother was the founder of LuvFromLily.

Derwin said the organization used to be focused on spreading his mother’s cancer journey and her approach to staying positive throughout it, but the goal has now focused more on food security for children.

“Our whole mission is to give school-aged children meals so that way they could focus more on academics and extracurriculars and their passions instead of whether they can have a meal,” Derwin said.

When their family lived in Memphis, Tennessee, Derwin’s mother volunteered and set up a whole auction for a charity called Empty Bowls fighting food insecurity, and she tutored children at schools with low-income students.

“This charity is really in her name, trying to maintain her and trying to reflect some of her kindhearted charity and generosity that she sort of lived her life by,” Derwin said.

While the organization is small, Derwin said the reach is pretty big, as they have been able to ship sandwiches to Memphis, Tennessee, to give back to their community.

The other organization the money was donated to, Western States Cancer Research, focuses on “helping patients get on clinical trials in their own community so they don’t have to travel a long distance when they’re already sick,” CEO Lisa Switzer said.

Western States Cancer Research as been around for 40 years and under the leadership of Switzer for almost seven years. The company is part of the National Cancer Institute, which supplies most of the studies it connects patients with.

“We work with physicians in the Denver Metro area, but people come from Wyoming, Nebraska, the Dakotas to be able to get into treatment with our physicians,” Switzer said.

The treatments and studies their patients get on help people who would otherwise be dying have a better quality of life, and sometimes cancers that would have killed people 10 years ago are now chronic illnesses or completely curable.

This concert, which started out of Thomas’ garage, gathered donations totaling about $2,400, or $1,200 for each charity, through online sales alone.

“(The concert) definitely exceeded my expectations in ways of like how well the band did, how many people showed up — it was amazing,” Thomas said.

For LuvFromLily, Derwin said this money will probably go toward expanding distribution to Connecticut.

“A lot of that money will go to just being able to pay for the delivery and the shipping costs associated with shipping sandwiches,” Derwin said.

As for Western States Cancer Research, a 501c3 nonprofit organization, Switzer said that any money they get from fundraising helps carry out their mission, whether it’s buying a drug kit or paying for a staff person who’s going to meet with those patients.

“Sometimes people live without hope when they have cancer,” Switzer said. “And when you see young people like this, committing a Friday night when they can be playing for money and doing it for free, that gives me hope, and that will give our patients and our community hope, so we’re incredibly grateful for this.”