Imagine Dragons bassist Ben McKee pledges $1,000 donation every day for a year

Musician Ben McKee, an El Molino grad, vowed this week to give away $1,000 a day for a year. One of his first donations was to Positive Images in Santa Rosa.|
DAN TAYLOR
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Imagine Dragons bassist Ben McKee, who grew up in Forestville and graduated from El Molino High School, has announced he will donate $1,000 a day to a different community organization for a full year.

“The past year has been a particularly challenging time for a lot of people,” McKee wrote Tuesday on Twitter. “The organizations that fight to support and protect the most vulnerable of us have been pushed beyond their limits. I have set aside $365,000 and over the next year I will be giving away $1,000 a day.”

He will donate $1,000 this week to Sonoma County’s Positive Images, which mentors LGBTQIA+ youth, and TLC Child & Family Services, a foster family and adoption agency based in Sebastopol.

“We were blown away by Ben’s generous gift to Positive Images. It’s incredible when someone with a public platform uses it to create visibility for a cause they care about,” said Jessica Carroll, program director at Positive Images. “Ben’s donation will help us create a new position so that we can continue to grow our ability to support our queer and trans community in Sonoma County.”

McKee expressed his desire to give back to the greater community out of gratitude for his career success.

“Life has been incredibly generous to me,” McKee wrote in his multi-part Tweet. “Never did I think that my journey would take me from a dead-end, dirt road in a tiny town in Northern California to some of the biggest stages, in front of the best fans, as a member of one of the most successful bands in the world.”

The band has won three American Music Awards, nine Billboard Music Awards, one Grammy Award, one MTV Video Music Award and one World Music Award.

Imagine Dragons, which emerged from Las Vegas in 2008, played the BottleRock music festival in downtown Napa in 2015, a Northern California homecoming of sorts for McKee, and returned in 2019.

The 2020 BottleRock festival was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, but Imagine Dragons was included in a virtual series of recorded performances from previous events.

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.

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