If you're looking to maximize your fundraising efforts, DonorBox's online donation platform is designed to help you reach your fundraising goals with ease. Discover the world of simplified, seamless fundraising at donorbox.org. DonorBox, helping you help others. Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. I'm your host Megan Spear, and joining me today is LaCroix Nixon, who's the founder and director of Slam Connection, very excited to dig into his story and his journey in the non-profit space and to running this nonprofit and also around building communities. LaCroix, welcome to the podcast. Hey, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. So tell us a little bit about your journey. So Slam Connection, for those who might not be familiar, is focused on Slam Poetry. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay. So tell us a little bit about your journey as a Slam Poet and how that led to Slam Connection. Awesome. Yes. So Slam Connection, we are a non-profit, we use Slam and spoken word poetry as a means for community action. Okay. Let's level set from the jump. So if somebody is listening who is not maybe familiar with Slam Poetry yet, not as familiar with spoken word, this is not the poems that someone made you read in English class in seventh grade. Right? This is not your traditional, like, this Shakespearean sonnets. Tell us a little bit about what Slam Poetry is. We're all working from the same place. All right. Let me bring you guys into the Spiderverse real quick. Yes. So you have poetry, which is like the grand scope of writing figuratively. You have page poetry or written poetry. So that's what you learned in English class. In Walt Whitman's, EE coming, Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Shel Silverstein, all those guys. Right? Then you have spoken word. Spoken word is poetry meant to be spoken. It's meant to be heard. With page poetry, it's poetry meant to be read. So I'm writing with the idea that someone's going to read this. When I'm doing spoken word, I'm writing with the idea of somebody's going to hear this. I'm going to be on a stage or in front of people. So there's more of an intersection of performance as well as poetry. So it's not as, I don't want to say like page poetry is one dimensional, but there's more dimensions to spoken word. Slam is spoken word in a competition format. So slam poets are spoken word poets. It's just a lot more poets will find themselves in competition more than they are just on stage just to be on stage. So slam is simply spoken word in competition format and there's a whole science to that because now you're not just performing for the crowd, you're performing for a panel of about five judges and you have to figure out what the judge is like, what poet went before you, how did that score, what happens now and how do I move forward in the rounds and what kind of slam is this, is this a topicality slam where the judges seem to prefer a specific kind of topic or is this more of a bar heavy slam, you got to come in with the bar or the punch lines or is this a story, like you got it. It's a lot of feeling the room, right? Because at the end of the day, the plan is not just to be the best poet, but the best poet in that room at that moment. So that's the basic synopsis of what we're dealing with here. I love that. So how did you get into slam to start? Let me take you all the way back, it was high school, 10th grade, right? Again, English class, poetry unit, we have to write a Villanelle and say it in front of the entire class and I'm just like super shy, like if I would have told that version of myself that, hey, like nine years from now, you're going to be standing up and speaking in front of people, I would have laughed, right? Not a chance. My teacher says, all right, Croix, it's time for you to get up and perform. I'm too scared to get up and perform. She's like, you know, it's cool. I'll read what you got for you. She reads what I have. The crowd is like, ooh, and an eye, like whoa, that's crazy. After the class, she's like, you know what, you should write more. You should do this one. This is actually pretty good. So I just started writing more. I didn't really see myself as a poet. I was just writing poetry. There's a difference. I was just kind of doing the thing. There was a Black History Month program that I was at War Hill High School, Black History Month program comes around. They had me do a poem in front of the school, and when it goes crazy, I still don't see myself as a poet. She gets me entered into this competition for the NAACP called the Axo program. It spans like 26 different categories, all from culinary arts to physics, engineering, dance, name it. So I go to nationals for poetry and engineering. Two different sizes of the brain, I know. I was like, all right, cool. I get there and I don't win. I'm pretty sure I got demolished. It was crazy. But that was the first place I saw what poetry could be. Up to that point, my entire scope of poetry was whatever I learned in English class or seen in a textbook. This is the first place I saw a spoken word in person and realized, oh, okay, that's what it could sound like. So rinse and repeat next year, go to the nationals again, engineering, poetry. I don't win again. I'm like, all right, cool, whatever. Fast forward to fall 2015, I go to Liberty University. At the time, I'm going for an engineering degree. That was my plan, right? There was this on-campus ministry called Bridging the Opera of the Ministries. They spread the gospel through the arts, somebody somehow found out that I did poetry in high school. They were like, all right, cool. So we have this thing coming up and we're going to put you on stage, we need two spoken word pieces. I didn't have two spoken word pieces. I get up there and I freestyle like half of the second piece and everybody's like, whoa, that was great. It's crazy. That was awesome. And then it just kind of stuck when you join this ministry, they give you like a name or something like that. They gave me the name Atlas because I really held up the people around me, right? So that's where that name kind of came from. I mentioned that performance because at the performance I met a man by the name of Nick George. He runs a non-profit organization in Lynchburg regime called The Listening. He's transferred leadership and he's living out in Richmond, I believe, but he ran an organization out there for about 12 years and has really done so much for the art community there. He heard about what I was doing. He's like, hey, man, we got to have you come through to all open mics and stuff like that. And then I just started serving in the community, started going to open mics, started getting off campus more. The running joke was that it's like, I don't know how you're passing your classes because you're off campus more than you're on campus. So I was at Liberty, but I was also in the city of Lynchburg and I did that until I graduated or really until COVID and then had to come home and then I came home to Williamsburg and there's not really much here, there's no platforms for it, there's nobody cultivating it. And I'm like, okay, what can I do? Me, I'm a devout Christian, so I was like, God, what am I supposed to do? God was like, what are you having your hands? Over the last, at this point, seven, eight, six, seven, eight years, I'd been serving in my community. I had mentored people, I had learned so much and I didn't realize how much I learned until I started applying it. This is where slam connection comes about because I'm like, we don't need just another dope collective of poets or people, we need people that care and if the poet is the means in which we connect everybody, then let's do it. I was like, all right, cool, I just didn't know how to do any of this stuff. I was like, where do I go? Into the verb enders, okay, so right now, Virginia has four slam teams that will be representing on a national level in Pompano Beach, Florida at the Southern Fried Poetry Slam. Right now, it's the biggest team competition in the world. You in there, you're basically nationally ranked, that's just how it goes. Teams from all over the nation go to Southern Fried. This is in 2023. I had joined the team and to join the team, you have to go through a season, you have to qualify for a grand slam, then you have to finish top four at the grand slam to qualify for the five man team. I get on there, I win the grand slam, get on the team and that's when I learned what slam really was. I got around people that were experienced every more season. They were giving me jewels, dropping gems, teaching me all of the ins and outs. I was also getting more connected with the greater poetry scene of Virginia without even realizing it. Before I knew it, I'm like, oh shoot, I got a little network here. We get on the team, last year, nationals was in Knoxville, Tennessee. We go out there, we finished third in the nation. It was an amazing experience and not just writing for myself, but learning how to write on the team, learning how to match different writing styles and how to be on the team, still be yourself, still be a strong poet and performer, but also, okay, we have to make sure we're making room for everybody else or sometimes you might have to dial back because you're overstepping somebody here. It's a lot so that happened and during that time when we're preparing for nationals, slam connection is starting to take off. I kind of write, I kind of tell stories like this, so please try to keep up. What was it? Slam connection's first event. We were a part of the, at the time we were kind of an extension of the writer's guild of Virginia. They had heard about what we were doing and were like, hey, you guys could be a part of us until you guys can stand on your own two feet. I was like, say less. So at the time, it was really just me with an idea. I didn't have a team yet. So within three weeks of me joining the executive board, they said, hey, we have a venue. If you want to put together an open mic, we'd be down for that. I said, oh, really? They said, really? And that's what happened on a stormy night in the middle of the summer. We got 50 people to come out to the prime outlets at what was the Bookwarehouse. And it was an amazing night and there had never really been like anything like that in Williamsburg consistently. So it was the first Friday of each month. So we did it for two months. And then on the third month, the Bookwarehouse shut down and I was like, okay, you're killing me. But during that time, we'd also established a relationship with Warhol High School. I was an alumni there. Some people that knew me from when I went to the school heard about what I was doing. And I was able to get connected with them. We have now have an after school program that goes every Wednesday, we teach kids how to write a form. Out of that came this land connection curriculum because we had to have a more set and structured way of teaching these skills. So at this point, we've already had events. We have a curriculum. We have workshops and I'm like, okay, there's momentum here. We weren't even an official nonprofit yet. And that's the funny thing about it. We were just moving and doing exactly what we were supposed to do. Fast forward to 2023, 2023, preparing for bird vendors. But at the same time, every first Friday of each month, starting in April of 2023, we were having open mics and we just promoted them, let people know what's going on. We reached out to all of our network and people came through. Even the first time we had it, I was almost surprised, like of how many people came through and supported us. And then when they realized, oh, wow, this is different. The numbers grew. I think it was like September, it was like August or September, there was one open mic where there, it was standing remotely in there. If you've been in there, I'm talking about calling 15 coffee off of Merrimack Trail. It's a perfect amount of space for us. And we were packing it out every month and I was just like, oh, okay, we got a little movement out here. All right. Cool. And just like that, we were able to form a community of artists and people that came through regularly during that time. We also established a connection partnership with the Williamsburg Regional Library. They've been so integral and amazing for letting us host a free public workshop every last Saturday of the month. So now at this point, we have a curriculum, we have two events a month, and we have a network and it was, it's really been on and up from there. Last year, we hosted our SLAM season. We didn't put together a SLAM team, but we hosted a SLAM season so people could come out and try out and we're introducing SLAM and spoken word poetry into a city that's never really seen it before. So building the scene while also moving forward in it. So that's the general story. Elevate your fundraising strategy effortlessly with DonorBox, the online fundraising platform that streamlines your operations, amplifies donations, and delivers a user-friendly experience for your supporters. Design captivating donation forms, accept digital wallet payments, seamlessly monitor donations, and automate receipt generation. Joining is a breeze with no setup or monthly fees. From customizable donation forms and four times faster, ultra-swift checkout to seamless in-person giving with DonorBox Live kiosk, DonorBox makes giving simple and fast for your donors. DonorBox.org and unlock your full fundraising potential today. What I love about your story and why you're on the podcast today is that you had a vision because you had a passion for something and so I feel like so many people get stuck. They want to make a difference. They want to, they have, whether it's a cause or a, whatever it is in the arts, they have something that they're passionate about but they feel like they can't do, like, I'm just one person, what can I do, right? I don't have my 501(c)(3) yet. I am just getting started and I think it's so easy to get discouraged in that but what I love about your story is like you didn't intend to go out and solve this problem, right? But you had a passion and went for it and built a community around it. And so, talk to me a little bit about the community that you are serving now. Who's the demographic of people who are a part of this community and why do you feel like that's growing so quickly? Okay. Well, for one thing, Williamsburg, most people look at Williamsburg as like, "Oh, it's a retirement community. It's a terrorist town." All I know about Williamsburg is like, I went one time and saw the butter churners. That's what people think. So the idea of starting like an art scene in Williamsburg, most people outside of the city were like, "What are you talking about?" I'm going to find out. There's a lot of talented people here across many different mediums, whether it's poetry, whether it's visual arts, whether it's music. Williamsburg has two symphony orchestras in an opera here, which is more than a lot of bigger cities. So I'm like, "Okay, there's something here. I'm going to find out we're sitting on top of a gold mine as far as what people are looking for. You have a talented population and people that are hungry for a community, especially in a post-COVID world, community is now the new commodity, and you also have businesses and other bigger organizations that are looking for people that are hungry. So all you have to do is be the bridge or be the connection for lack of a better term. I like what you said, like, "I'm just one person. What can I do?" It's true. I am just one person. That's why I realized before I could do anything in Williamsburg, I have to build the foundation of a network first. Before I could go and make the 501(c)(3) and just start, I needed to have people around me that would not only support me, but would really just let me know, like, "Hey, actually, you might want to try it this way." Actually, we tried this before here. It might work differently there, but this is what happened. I've had a lot of people from the poetry community outside of the poetry community, and a like that have really just poured into me and let me know, like, "Okay, yeah, this works," or, "Hey, you're doing a good job," or, "Hey, I see what you're trying to do. Why don't you flip it this way?" And another thing, there's somebody in the area, good chance somebody's either tried what you're doing or is either already doing what you're doing. So, my original, before I wanted to change anything, my original attitude was, like, if anybody is in the area doing this, I would gladly join and come alongside and help make what you're doing better, because this isn't about my platform. It's not about my name, it's about, "Oh, well, let's make opportunities for people." I grew up in this town, and I didn't know anything was going on. For example, poetry society in Virginia, they elect the Poet Laureate for the state every two years, and their headquarters is in Williamsburg, but I didn't know they were here, because no one had ever told me I had originally re-stopped to them, and they were the ones that ended up helping me get into the schools. So it's a lot of, like, understand the ground you're standing on before you try to change it. Yeah. Yeah. I love the phrase that you used, and I want to make sure that it doesn't get lost, so we're going to toss it out and say it again, that community is the new commodity, right? Because I think that, similar, you have all these folks who are like, "Yeah, I want to make a difference. I have a passion or a thing I want to try and change about the world or a thing I want to start, but I don't have the funds or the resources to do it," and we get so hung up sometimes on the dollars that we forget about the community and the people, that there's so much that you can do when a community gets rallied around something outside of all of the other traditional kind of funding sources that we go have to chase after in the non-profit space sometime. Yeah. It can get real dicey, because starting a non-profit is not cheap, but one thing, like I said, when eventually my team, when we're looking at what SLAM connection is and what it could be, we got outside of the arts, because if you're in the arts to make money, good luck. No. Good luck. That's just the nature of things, but when we realized that our art was bridging gaps and cultural divides, and it was being the thing that the community needed, we realized that, "Oh, we're not going anywhere," and it doesn't matter how much money we have or don't have. People are going to be looking for us. Like I said, not only is community the new commodity, but people are looking for answers. People are looking for just what's real. One thing we do at our open mics all the time is we have a 15-minute intermission, and I tell people all the time, it's like, "All right, 15-minute intermission, meet somebody you didn't walk in the door with." We have Uno cards set up, connect for, shout out column 15. They have a cabinet full of games and stuff. We set them out on the table, and we purposely create an environment for people to interact. We purposely create an environment for people to get to know other people and realize, "Oh, a lot of us are exactly the same," or, "A lot of us have a lot of similar experiences." It doesn't matter if you're the dopest artist on the planet, can you connect with people, can you serve people, and that's really what our organization is built on, but we've been able to do that because we've already done it. You asked about the demographics specifically, I want to make sure I'm opening the questions. Our demographic is more poets, page, spoken word, or slam poets, or anybody interested in getting into the art form, because once you get into the art form, you get connected to the community, right, and that's just the nature of the art, but we're really gearing towards those that are already writing, or those interested in starting to write. Within our network, we have a couple different people that are publishers, so if you're interested in writing the book, whether it be a poetry book, or a novel, or whatever, we can connect you with different people that can help you do that thing because that's what community is for. I love that. Ultimately, there has to be no age demographic to that, right? Anybody can be a writer. Really? I can have something to say, I would think it's got to have a pretty broad appeal from that perspective. Right, so like I said, we have a pretty budding youth section of slam changer. At the end of each slam season, you have a grand slam. Grand Slam is Super Bowl, right? Cheers up. It's a whole thing. We had an adult grand slam, for those that have been competing in our season, the week before that, at the Williamsburg Library Theatre, we had the first ever Historic Triangle Youth Grand Slam. We had four poets from around the area. We had two from Warhill, one from Ruten, and one from YMCA. When I'm not doing poetry, I am the regional team director for the YMCA, meaning I can create and implement different programs as I see fit or as I see needed within the department. Our departments, a lot of which, contrary to popular belief, the teen demographic from ages about 12 to 18 is the most unreached demographic across different organizations, different departments, whatever. There's just not a lot of programming for that age group for a wide variety of reasons. I was like, okay, well, we already have a slam connection curriculum. All we have to do is just make the program. I made the program called Writing Storm. One child jumped in. He started in September, never wrote poetry or anything like that before. He goes all the way through our program, gets to February. He finishes second in the historic Triangle Grand Slam, and then YMCA, we have a community impact dinner, where all the directors from all across the association come in. Me and him co-wrote a duet piece and performed it for the entire dinner, and over 400 people are in the room standing ovation, everybody's losing their minds. They haven't ever seen anything like that before, and that's what the slam connection is really about. We really believe anybody can be a writer. Anybody can do this thing, but it's more or less, especially for kids. We want to empower them to have that voice, because a lot of times, I think about most kids, no matter what age they are, from five to 18, they're told to sit down and shut up and sit in class and listen to somebody else. Then suddenly, it was like, okay, we want to hear what you think. A lot of adults don't want to hear that they disagree with them, and don't want to see them. True. It's in the contrary. Right. There's a place where this is the first place for a lot of those kids, where they can be open and be free. Even for our elderly population, there's a lot of them that are like, oh, I heard about this spoken word stuff, I'm interested to try it. They'll come into our workshops, we need them to do the prompts, and they'll get up there and kill it. I'm like, yeah, let's go. It's moments like that, and it's moments like that, so yeah, we keep it open and really free for everyone to come in. Love that. Tell me about where you think you're headed. Ooh. What comes next? Okay. So first things first, right now, we are in talks with the City of Williamsburg, specifically the Williamsburg Public Arts Commission, to install the first ever poet laureate for the City of Williamsburg. It's interesting to think that a city with people like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and like all these. Like big name voices and writers for American history, but the city itself has never really had a voice, right? So a laureate would be the person that even if slam connection kind of fades into the distance or say, I'm not leading slam connection anymore, that laureate will be the spearhead of the really ongoing arts movement and really arts renaissance. That's not just happening in Williamsburg, but a part of what's happening in really the greater state of Virginia. So that's the first thing for just to kind of give some context. I originally wrote the proposal late last year or early this year, I think sometime in the past, I wrote the proposal and they were the entire, the city was really impressed what we had to offer and I, I could be the first. So that's up, so that's up for grabs. So establishing that another thing we're looking to do is we're going to be starting a pot cast soon. So specifically talking about a lot of these slam poetry things and happenings in the state of Virginia, what people don't realize that Virginia is a very strong state in the slam scene. In the last three years, two Virginia teams are finished in the top three in the nation. So Virginia is strong in amongst the East Coast, that says a lot, because a lot of the best poets in the nation are right from Baltimore all the way down to Florida. So it holds weight. One thing we really want to do, especially a slam connection, we really want to talk about what's going on, not just the art of poetry, but how it's influencing different scenes and cultures around the state and not just ours and letting people know that, oh, yeah, like there's a greater, there's a whole universe out there. You might want to go on a star journey, get into your starship and go to planet Richmond real quick or go down to the bird benders in Norfolk or go up to Charlottesville, see spellbound. You know what I'm saying? That's what's going on. And that's something we're going to be starting possibly July, August. Another thing that we're trying to do is the Child Defense Fund Freedom School. It's a six week summer intensive for grades K through 12, really, and it focuses on reading, reading comprehension, writing, anything that has to do with literature. But the special thing about this program is that it's not like your typical school and it has its original roots in the original civil rights movement, as in the same people that started that also started this and to be a part of it is to be part of the ongoing civil rights movement in America. It's an amazing program helped over millions of kids around the country. The first year I got involved in it with the listening in Lynchburg, 2019. I was a servant leader intern or a teacher, as you'd say, and then I was going to be part of it in 2020. COVID had other plans, 2021 comes around, I am now a site coordinator, and I'm helping to run the entirety of the program. That site out there, we were just specifically for the middle schoolers because there were no middle school programs during the summer. So we stepped in and became that niche. It was an amazing moment because we dealt with the kids that had troubled backgrounds or the kids that had bad grades or the bad kids, the ones that none of the teachers wanted to deal with, the ones with rap sheets. Man, by the time they came out of our program, you wouldn't even know. You wouldn't even know. And it was an amazing transformation. We want to bring that to Williamsburg. So just a few of the things. Just a few. That's a very bright future. LaCroix. I have really enjoyed this conversation and I think that a lot of people in our audience are going to find it super encouraging to hear what somebody can do when they have a passion, but because of the community around them and what they can do to engage that community. So I really appreciate you sharing your story with us today. Again, my guest has been LaCroix Nixon, who's the founder and director of Slam Connection. If someone wanted to find you and learn more, what's the best way to reach out to you? Yes. All right. So if you want to follow me specifically, I'm on Instagram as @listnixon. I am on Facebook as LaCroix Nixon. I am not on Twitter because Twitter is wild. If you want to follow Slam Connection, we are on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. We have videos posted on our YouTube channel, just Slam Connection, all one word, and you'll know us when you see us. I love that. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time and your story. Thanks so much. Thank you. Again, this has been another episode of the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Speer. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time. [Music] [Music]
