Four years ago, Clyde Ferguson Jr. started hosting backyard music concerts at his Elkin, N.C., home along with three neighbors. The inaugural music festival was called “Put a Little Love in Your Yard,” a spin on the 1969 hit single by Jackie DeShannon.

“It’s about sharing and caring and being who you are,” Ferguson said. “Our main theme always is that you don’t have to look like me, but you have to learn to like me. Scripture says we’re all created in God’s image.”

Ferguson, an award-winning music educator and gospel and blues bassist, is a Mennonite Central Committee East Coast board member representing Eastern District Conference of the U.S. Mennonite Brethren. He was looking for ways to bring the story of MCC to his community.

“I kept saying, people in North Carolina don’t know who MCC is, and I don’t know how to show them,” he said.

But he thought of a way.

On June 15, Ferguson and his neighbors hosted their fourth annual backyard music festival. The theme, “Blues for World Peace and Unity,” invited concertgoers to donate to MCC’s relief, development and peacebuilding ministries.

The festival featured musical groups across multiple genres. It typically attracts 150 to 200 attendees.

Jennifer Gray and Kent Clifford Cooley, who form the gospel group Renewed, are returning performers.

“From the beginning of time, music has healed people,” Gray said. “When there were wars and there was famine, people danced, people sang. When people were living in slavery, they sang, they danced. So music is hope. As long as you have a song, you can have hope and you have love.”

At the MCC tent, MCC staff interacted with festivalgoers from diverse religious, ethnic and social backgrounds who learned about MCC’s relief, development and peacebuilding ministry.

In the grassy yard, Mennonite ­Brethren Anabaptists sat next to a Jewish rabbi, who sat next to people from no religious background, who sat next to members of the LGBTQ community, who sat next to Southern Baptists.

“I think it’s great to get everyone together from different races, different cultural backgrounds, different religions,” said Melissa Parker, a neighbor.

Ferguson is trying to recruit 100 people in his area to sew base units for MCC dignity kits, which provide reusable menstrual hygiene products for women and girls. He hopes each person will sew five base units, resulting in 500 women and girls somewhere in the world who will have access to sustainable hygiene. He connected with festivalgoers who expressed interest in getting involved.

“I want to make an impact wherever I can,” Ferguson said. “It dawned on me that we really need to do some more. North Carolina needs to get involved.”

As the festival wound down, neighbors and festival attendees got out of their lawn chairs to dance together and sing along to songs they knew.

“If I can get different cultures to cooperate in my backyard, I know that it will go on the street, and it will continue to grow,” Ferguson said. “It’s one person at a time, and we just make it infectious.”