Carlos Santana

Summer is concert season. It seems like all bands go on tour. Nothing like live music on a warm summer night!

What if you could host a benefit concert? You have a cause that's important to you. What better way to have it announced than by your favorite performer in a room full of people who paid big bucks to get there?

This is the point of the Virtual Concert Week on Squidoo.

Who would you pick and what cause would you raise money for? Make a lens and tell us about it!

If I was going to have a concert for charity, I would pick Carlos Santana. I believe that with his huge following and years of playing for fans around the world, the concert would definitely sell out, benefiting my charity.

Which album to pick - hmmm? I can't decide, so how about a medley of some of Santana's best.

But I always feel that concerts are sometimes too short. So, since this is a virtual concert, I made it into two Acts with intermissions in between. Enjoy!

I picked the Acumen Fund charity as the beneficiary of this virtual concert because I truly believe in their cause and love what they are doing to help alleviate world poverty.

Acumen Fund is a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. We seek to prove that small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor. Our investments focus on delivering affordable, critical goods and services - like health, water, housing and energy - through innovative, market-oriented approaches.

Santana's record sales in the 1990s were very low. Toward the end of the decade he was without a contract. However, Arista Records' Clive Davis, who had worked with Santana at Columbia, signed him and encouraged him to record a star-studded album with mostly younger artists. The result was 1999's Supernatural, which included collaborations with Everlast, Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty, Eric Clapton, Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, Cee-Lo, Mana, Dave Matthews, and others.

The lead single was "Smooth", a dynamic cha-cha stop-start number co-written and sung by Rob Thomas, and laced throughout with Santana's guitar fills and runs. The track's energy was immediately apparent on radio, and it was played on a wide variety of station formats. "Smooth" spent twelve weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming in the process the last #1 single of the 1990s. The music video set on a hot barrio street was also very popular. Supernatural reached number one on the US album charts and the follow-up single, "Maria Maria", featuring the R&B duo The Product G&B, also hit number one, spending ten weeks there in the spring of 2000. Supernatural eventually sold over 15 million copies in the United States, making it Santana's biggest sales success by far.

Supernatural won nine Grammy Awards (eight for Santana personally), including Album of the Year, Record of the Year for "Smooth", and Song of the Year for Thomas and Itaal Shur. Santana's acceptance speeches described his feelings about music's place in one's spiritual existence. In 2001, Santana's guitar skills were featured in Michael Jackson's song "Whatever Happens", from the album Invincible. Rolling Stone also named Santana number 15 on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time in 2003!

(Article Source)

Milagro ("Miracle") is a charitable foundation that supports underrepresented and underprivileged children and youth in the areas of arts, education and health.

The foundation makes grants to organizations that work with children and youth, especially those at risk and disadvantaged due to such factors as poor health, illiteracy, or insufficient educational and cultural opportunities.

Some of the agencies they have funded: Loving Paws-provides trained dogs for disabled children; the Canal Alliance Youth Development tutoring and mentoring program; Felecia Gaston's Performing Stars in Marin City; the Duffy Hughes Memorial Stove Project in Guatemala which builds safe ventilated stoves inside the huts of poor families; Hand in Hand - bilingual bicultural schools for Jewish and Arab children in Israel; Shared Hope which buys back children who are sold into prostitution and sexual slavery by their families, educates and houses them in India, the Dominican Republic, Fiji, Jamaica and South Africa.

Also, The Beach House is located within Golden Gate National Recreation Area in the Marin Headlands and serves homeless and formerly homeless children and youth. It's a cozy cottage where homeless children escape the restrictions of the shelters. Children experience nature through walks, biking, romps on the sandy beach, and splashing in the ocean. Children choose art and craft activities, playtime adventures, baking or cooking.

Recent grantees include Ingwavuma Orphan Care in South Africa which Deborah and Carlos visited. They are supplying them with 100 water rollers. Circulo Vida in the Bay Area provides counseling services for Latino children who have parents with cancer. Source: Milagro Foundation Website