About Us
Love ● Connection ● Empowerment
Every day, approximately 200 people die from drug overdoses. Despite the increased amount of attention the crisis has gotten, this number continues to rise. On March 2nd, 2016, my brother, Michael Dunne was among these people. It’s easy to minimize these lives down to a statistic, a number, or just a word—“junkies.” It hides our own vulnerability and keeps us safe from the pain of the reality of the situation. But these are people, each with their own unique and meaningful lives, families, friends, dreams, goals, and stories. If we are to make any sort of dent in combating this epidemic, we must not lose sight of this and we must work to empower, love, and connect with each other.
Our Story
Beyond Dope Productions is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization born out of my own pain and the nagging voice inside me that I need to do something to prevent others from feeling it. With love, connection, and empowerment as my guiding principles, I originally sought to do a single benefit concert but, I had never planned an event like this before. The best piece of advice I got was to tell as many people as you can. This both locked me into keeping my word of making the event happen and also resulted in an outpouring of support. Before I knew it, I found partners, a ton of volunteers, and we formally brought on several other individuals to our growing team. Beyond Dope was no longer just a singular event, but an entire community organization empowered to enact real change. Today, we have chapters in the north east, south east, and midwest and we've spread our movement to events and music festivals around the country.
The Beyond Dope Movement has several goals. We seek to make electronic music events safer through concrete actions like Narcan and fentanyl test strip training and distribution. We seek to empower through non biased substance education and resource referral. We seek to creating deep, meaningful, and lasting connections between members of the community through normalizing conversation around the shared hardships alongside events that foster joy.
Our events come in different forms from mindful benefit concerts and comedy shows, to more intimate events like DopeChats. But, at all of them you can expect to find a passionate group of people who will love you no matter who you are and who want to empower you to be your best self. So come say hi.
Deanna Dunne
Founder/Executive Director
Beyond Dope Productions, Inc.
