Lyme disease awareness reached one of New York City’s biggest stages on September 22, 2026, when Music for Action brought Young the Giant, St. Lucia, the Lyme community, and thousands of concertgoers together at SummerStage in Central Park.

Presented by City Parks Foundation in partnership with LymeLnk, Music for Action was created to bring Lyme and tick-borne disease awareness into mainstream culture while helping people understand how to enjoy the outdoors more safely.

For Tick Boot Camp, the night represented something we believe deeply: Lyme disease awareness grows when patients, researchers, doctors, nonprofit organizations, innovators, storytellers, and advocates work together to reach people beyond the Lyme community.

Music for Action Brings Lyme Disease Awareness Into Mainstream Culture

The free, all-ages concert took place at SummerStage in Central Park during Climate Week NYC, with doors opening at 6 p.m. and performances running into the evening.

Multi-platinum rock band Young the Giant headlined the event, joined by the alt-pop project St. Lucia and an opening DJ set from DREEEMY.

But Music for Action was about more than music.

The event used the reach and energy of a major Central Park concert to introduce thousands of people to Lyme disease, tick-borne illness, tick prevention, and the relationship between environmental changes and changing tick populations.

That is an important shift for Lyme advocacy. Instead of waiting for people to learn about Lyme disease only after a frightening tick bite or life-changing illness, events like Music for Action bring education to people where they already are.

City Parks Foundation presented the event in partnership with LymeLnk, with major support from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation’s Cohen Lyme & Tickborne Disease Initiative. Community support also included Global Lyme Alliance, LymeLight Foundation, Project Lyme, and The Quiet Epidemic.

Eva Scarano and LymeLnk Turn a Vision Into Action

At the center of Music for Action was Eva Scarano, founder and executive director of LymeLnk.

After her own experience with Lyme and tick-borne illness, Eva founded LymeLnk to make an often invisible and misunderstood disease more visible through storytelling, education, community, and advocacy.

Music for Action took that mission to another level.

Instead of creating an event primarily for people who already understood Lyme disease, Eva and the LymeLnk team helped place the conversation in front of music fans, New Yorkers, visitors, climate advocates, and people who may never before have thought seriously about ticks or tick-borne illness.

Tick Boot Camp Helps Music for Action Reach More Than 250,000 People

Tick Boot Camp was proud to support Eva and the Music for Action team by using our platform and community to help spread the word before the concert.

Our pre-event awareness efforts helped put Music for Action in front of more than 250,000 unique people, giving people the opportunity to learn about the event, attend in person, share it with others, or watch the concert through the livestream.

That reach matters.

Every person who learns how to better protect themselves from ticks is someone who may be able to prevent a future tick-borne infection. Every person who hears a Lyme patient’s story may become more understanding when a family member, friend, coworker, or patient says they are struggling. And every person introduced to the scale of this problem becomes part of a larger public conversation that Lyme patients have been asking for for decades.

This type of advocacy is an important part of the Tick Boot Camp mission: bringing Lyme disease education, validation, community, and hope to audiences both inside and outside the Lyme community.

The Lyme Disease Community Shows Up in Central Park

One of the most powerful parts of the evening was seeing so many different parts of the Lyme community together in one place.

Researchers stood beside patients. Nonprofit leaders connected with entrepreneurs. Filmmakers spent time with doctors. Advocates who originally met because of illness were able to celebrate how far their work has carried them.

Among the Lyme disease advocates, nonprofit leaders, researchers, innovators, patients, and friends attending were:

• Eva Scarano – Founder and Executive Director of LymeLnk and a driving force behind Music for Action.
• Jennifer W. Katritos – Chief Executive Officer of Global Lyme Alliance.
• Kristen Harris – Global Lyme Alliance Education and Grant Program Manager and a former Tick Boot Camp Podcast guest who shared her story of post-traumatic growth after Lyme disease.
• Kat Silver and Lindsey Smith – Global Lyme Alliance ambassadors who helped run the GLA booth and connect with concertgoers throughout the evening. Learn more about the GLA Ambassador Program.
• Dana Parish – Singer-songwriter, Lyme disease advocate, Bay Area Lyme Foundation advisory board member, and member of its communications team.
• Lindsay Keys – Co-director, producer, and cinematographer of the award-winning Lyme disease documentary The Quiet Epidemic. Lindsay and co-director Winslow Crane-Murdoch previously joined the Tick Boot Camp Podcast to discuss the seven-year journey behind the film.
• Kerri Ciullo – Lyme disease advocate, Netflix documentary participant, and Tick Boot Camp Podcast guest who shared her Lyme, Bartonella, Babesia, and Bee Venom Therapy journey in Episode 416, Stinging Lyme. It was awesome to finally meet Kerri in person at Music for Action.
• Olivia Abrams – Project Lyme board member and co-founder of TiCK MiTT. Olivia previously joined the Tick Boot Camp Podcast with her father Steve to discuss their Lyme journeys and the creation of TiCK MiTT. Her company has now also introduced TiCK TEST, a rapid at-home test designed to analyze a removed tick for Borrelia burgdorferi. The test analyzes the tick itself and does not diagnose Lyme disease in a person or animal.
• Dr. James Bruzzese – New York physician providing care for people affected by Lyme disease, tick-borne infections, and complex chronic illness. His connection to Lyme disease is deeply personal: his younger sister Julia became profoundly ill as a child.
• Julia Bruzzese – Lyme disease survivor, disability advocate, future physician, and one of the central patient stories featured in The Quiet Epidemic. Julia shared her remarkable journey on Tick Boot Camp Episode 552.
• Carter Bradsky – Co-founder and CEO of LymeLess, an AI-powered platform built from his family’s experiences navigating Lyme and complex chronic illness. Carter and his sister Payton recently joined Tick Boot Camp to discuss AI, patient data, and the future of Lyme care.
• Monica Cipriani – Public health and tick-borne disease researcher whose work includes tick surveillance and Lyme disease research. Monica recently joined Tick Boot Camp for a Long Island tick-dragging field project and in-person studio interview.
• Jasmin Perdomo – Lyme disease advocate, poet, and author of Bittersweet Body. In Tick Boot Camp Episode 566, Jasmin shared how Lyme disease affected her health and identity and how poetry, faith, and community became part of her healing journey.
• Carolann Mazza Love – Lyme patient advocate who has shared her message of building a strong support system, staying connected, and never giving up through Tick Boot Camp’s Lyme Hackathon.
• Rika Keck – Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner, author, longtime Global Lyme Alliance Ambassador, and member of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society.

Innovation in Tick Prevention and Testing

Music for Action also gave attendees an opportunity to learn about practical tools being developed to help people protect themselves from ticks.

Olivia Abrams, a Project Lyme board member and co-founder of TiCK MiTT, was on hand sharing the company’s approach to tick prevention.

TiCK MiTT began with a reusable tool designed to collect loose crawling ticks from people, clothing, and pets before they attach. The company has now expanded its prevention ecosystem with TiCK TEST, a rapid test designed to analyze a removed tick for Borrelia burgdorferi, the primary bacterium responsible for Lyme disease in the United States.

Importantly, testing a tick is not the same as diagnosing the person who was bitten. A positive result indicates that the tested tick carried Borrelia burgdorferi; it does not establish that transmission occurred or that the person has Lyme disease.

Patients, Advocates, Researchers, and Friends Together

For people living with Lyme disease, gatherings like this can mean more than awareness statistics.

Chronic illness can be isolating. Many Lyme patients spend years trying to explain symptoms that others cannot see, navigating complicated healthcare systems, or searching for someone who understands what they are experiencing.

Community changes that experience.

Music for Action created a space where people connected through Lyme disease could celebrate friendship, progress, advocacy, science, prevention, innovation, and the possibility of reaching people who had never previously heard these stories.

Why Bringing Lyme Awareness to Central Park Matters

For decades, much of the Lyme disease conversation has taken place among patients, doctors, researchers, support groups, and advocacy organizations.

Those conversations remain essential, but public awareness cannot stop there.

Lyme and other tick-borne diseases affect families who may never attend a medical conference, join a Lyme support group, or search for a Lyme disease podcast. Prevention education has to reach hikers, parents, pet owners, athletes, gardeners, travelers, city residents, and anyone else who spends time outside.

A concert in Central Park provides an opportunity to do exactly that.

The message is not that people should fear the outdoors. The goal is to give people enough knowledge to enjoy it more safely: understand tick habitats, perform tick checks, remove attached ticks correctly, recognize possible symptoms, and know where to find reliable next steps after a bite.

If you have recently found a tick, visit the Tick Boot Camp Tick Bite Blueprint for practical information about what to do next.

Young the Giant Closes a Powerful Night for Lyme Awareness

As Young the Giant took the stage, thousands of people who had come to Central Park for live music had also been exposed to a conversation about Lyme disease and tick-borne illness.

That is what made Music for Action different.

Awareness was not happening on the sidelines of the event. It was woven into the experience.

From an Invisible Illness to a Visible Community

One of the recurring themes we hear from Lyme disease patients is how exhausting it can be to continually explain that what they are experiencing is real.

Music for Action challenged that invisibility in a very visible way.

Thousands of people gathered in Central Park. Lyme organizations staffed education tables. Researchers, patients, doctors, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, and advocates stood together. Major musicians performed. Hundreds of thousands more people encountered the event online before the doors ever opened.

That is how a conversation grows.

We are grateful to Eva Scarano and LymeLnk for creating the vision, to City Parks Foundation and SummerStage for giving that vision such an extraordinary platform, to the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation and the Lyme organizations that supported it, to Young the Giant and St. Lucia for lending their music and reach, and to every member of the Lyme community who shared, attended, watched, volunteered, educated, and connected.

Most importantly, we are grateful to every Lyme patient and family whose experiences continue to push this community toward greater awareness, better research, improved prevention, stronger support, and hope.

You are not alone, your experience matters, and together we can keep moving Lyme disease out of the shadows.

Continue Learning About Lyme Disease

Music for Action was one night, but the conversation continues.

• Explore more patient, doctor, researcher, and advocate conversations on the Tick Boot Camp Podcast.
• Recently bitten by a tick? Start with our Tick Bite Blueprint.
• Learn more about the challenges of Lyme disease testing.
• Explore more Lyme disease news, events, research, patient stories, and advocacy on the Tick Boot Camp Blog.