The next generation of entrepreneurs, content creators, and community leaders has arrived, and Eventbrite is helping them launch amazing events.
With guidance from Grammy-nominated rapper Jidenna, acclaimed chef Sophia Roe, and mindfulness expert Tamara Levitt, Eventbrite selected five innovators who bring people together to join the RECONVENE Accelerator program. Each winner will receive $20,000 to help fund their event concept as well as personalized coaching from industry leaders.
In the coming weeks, these talented individuals will host wellness workshops, a Vietnamese breakfast festival, poetry readings, concerts, and an immersive storybook experience — and you can attend them!
Read on to learn more about each of the Accelerator winners and the event ideas they’re bringing to life with the help of Eventbrite.
Victoria Loi, LoiLoi Breakfast Club
Growing up in Southern California as the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, Victoria Loi always felt a deep connection to her heritage. After college, Loi moved to Vietnam, where she worked in art direction and public relations, helping to throw parties and host events. She returned home to celebrate the Lunar New Year with her family in 2020, but Loi wasn’t able to return to Vietnam as borders closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That’s when I realized that the universe was probably telling me to slow down and to hone in on things that I really wanted to do,” Loi says.
Inspired by mornings spent drinking strong coffee at her grandparents’ Vietnamese bakery, Loi decided to open her own coffee shop. First, she landed a job at a cafe to learn more about the craft while looking for a space in the Little Saigon district of Orange County. When it opens, she’ll call her shop LoiLoi, a name that represents two generations of her family.
“It will be a space for the next generation in the neighborhood that raised them, where the community can sip on specialty drinks, have conversations, and be a safe space,” Loi says.
With Loi’s brick-and-mortar coffee shop still in the works, she’s devised an event called the LoiLoi Breakfast Club that brings a celebration of Vietnamese coffee, cuisine, and culture to her community.
The pop-up event will offer a chance to sip tasty drinks from LloiLoi Coffee and sample dishes like xôi (sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves) and xíu mại (Vietnamese meatballs), alongside fun activities like ping-pong and mahjong. The inaugural edition of the event will also coincide with Trung Thu, a mid-autumn Vietnamese festival associated with lotus-seed paste-filled mooncake pastries and colorful lantern displays.
Since joining the RECONVENE Accelerator program, Eventbrite’s experts have helped Loi crystalize her concept for an event that builds community. “This program has made me realize that no matter what, the community is there, people are excited, and I feel like it’s almost my duty to not let people down,” Loi says.
Even after she opens her coffee shop, Loi hopes to hold future editions of LoiLoi Breakfast Club and expand to different cities around the globe as the event grows. “The goal is to bring the Vietnamese community together, and attract fun people who are interested in learning more about different cultures and cuisine,” Loi says.
Rashan Brown, poetry me, please
High school heartbreak introduced Rashan Brown to the power of poetry, allowing him to pour his feelings onto the page. In 2019, he re-discovered his love of reading his poetry for an audience at an event in New York City, where he paid $20 to be featured on the lineup.
“I was like, damn, I want to do this again, but I don’t want to pay,” Brown says. “I figured if I host my own show, I couldn’t charge myself.”
With a name borrowed from an e-book of poetry that he published in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brown launched the first poetry me, please showcase in 2021, welcoming a randomly-selected group of spoken word performers to a stage where their set is recorded.
“If a poet comes on stage and does three poems, they’ll leave with six videos,” Brown says. “They receive all of that content free of charge and they can use it to amplify their own platforms.”
Brown positions the poetry me, please showcases as a “true safe space,” particularly for people of color, where the atmosphere is participatory and responsive, similar to a rap battle. The next edition he’s planning as part of the RECONVENE Accelerator will take place in a “special environment,” featuring a curated lineup of poets and educational activations where attendees can learn more about poetry.
According to Brown, around half of the attendees at his events have never seen poetry performed live before — with the help of Eventbrite, he’s hoping to become, “more intentional about how I’m communicating, getting someone to really understand what [poetry me, please] is.”
Poetry me, please has already hosted showcases in New York, London, and Ghana, but Brown has his sights set on expansion to additional cities. He’s also interested in finding a way to turn poetry me, please into an episodic television series that could bring talented poets to a streaming platform. Eventually, he’d like to see the showcase become big enough to fill Madison Square Garden or Yankee Stadium, giving poets the same cultural cachet as pop stars.
“I think we give so much appreciation to hip-hop and R&B, to singers and rappers — I’d like to bring that appreciation back to the foundation of poetry,” Brown says.
Jessie Diaz-Herrera, Power Plus Wellness
After a decade spent working in the wellness industry, Jessie Diaz-Herrera couldn’t help but notice that plus-sized instructors and clients were typically underrepresented in the classes she attended and taught.
“When I taught a class, more [plus-sized attendees] would come, but there weren’t enough safe spaces for them to want to work out,” Diaz-Herrera says. To foster a more welcoming environment, she co-founded Power Plus Wellness in 2020 as a monthly meetup group in New York City, hosting aerial yoga and underwater cycling classes at studios that were receptive to bodies of all shapes and sizes.
Power Plus Wellness now organizes between 12 to 15 classes in New York every month, including a Free the Jiggle dance class that Diaz-Herrera teaches. Attendees can try out yoga and pilates alongside other plus-sized attendees, guided by instructors who are adept at modifying workouts and understand the differing needs of each individual in the class.
“A lot of people have an assumption that every plus-size person only wants to work out to lose weight,” Diaz-Herrera says. “We started [Power Plus Wellness] with the intention of pursuing wellness in a safe space, free from diet culture and toxic gym culture.”
That more welcoming vision of fitness is showcased at the Free Your Mind events hosted by Power Plus Wellness, which offers an “upscale wellness experience” to the plus-sized community. The daylong immersive event seeks to dispel misconceptions about exercise and dieting while providing educational resources for attendees. The next edition of the event will feature yoga classes, meditation, group meals, beauty activities, and panel discussions. “It’s a day of movement, communing, dining, and knowledge sharing,” Diaz-Herrera says.
Joining Eventbrite’s RECONVENE Accelerator has helped Diaz-Herrera consider additional ways to grow the Free Your Mind event, from partnering with vendors that cater to the plus-sized community to rethinking the event’s marketing strategy.
“I think the power of Eventbrite is allowing other people to find us who may not have been able to find us,” Diaz-Herrera says.
More people may soon find Power Plus Wellness events in their area as the organization seeks to expand beyond New York. Diaz-Herrera envisions chapters nationwide, with ambassadors in cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia hosting classes and forming inclusive communities.
“We want people everywhere to love themselves at every stage of their life and every stage of their body,” Diaz-Herrera says.
Wes Chiller, The Dead Man’s Luau
Wes Chiller was destined to become a surf rocker. His beach-y childhood home in Southern California was filled with ukuleles, rattan furniture, and Hawaii memorabilia. Chiller formed his current, eponymous band in 2018, crafting laid-back tunes that he describes as “Jimmy Buffett meets Mac DeMarco-inspired indie rock.”
Hoping to expand the audience for his music, Chiller devised an idea for a rock and roll Halloween party called the Dead Man’s Luau. The first edition was a DIY affair, held in a rented El Segundo warehouse decorated with lights and projections, where 350 people showed up to see Wes Chiller perform and become a part of a musical narrative.
“All these concerts are like installments of a story,” Chiller says. “The Dead Man’s Luau is the setting within the universe that we’re operating in.”
The latest edition of the Dead Man’s Luau will be the largest to date, welcoming attendees into an immersive environment decked out in a tropical shipwreck theme. In addition to performances from three bands (including Wes Chiller, naturally), Chiller plans to have fire dancers, circus performers, and a Hawaiian cultural liaison at the event. Proceeds from the concert will benefit Surfers Healing Foundation, a local nonprofit that holds free events where kids with autism can experience the joys of surfing.
While this is the third Dead Man’s Luau that Chiller has organized, becoming a part of Eventbrite’s RECONVENE Accelerator has helped him realize that throwing events isn’t just a hobby.
“I had never written my business plan, I just didn’t think to do it for this [event],” Chiller says. “It’s just a total game changer, because now I know what to reach for.”
In the coming year, Chiller hopes to detach the Dead Man’s Luau from Halloween and bring the spooky rock and roll party to new cities that embrace surf culture in California and beyond. His dream is to transform the Luau into a destination event, bringing attendees to an oceanside destination where they can catch bands and surf waves.
“This event can take multiple forms and I believe in the concept, so I’ll take it there eventually,” Chiller says.
Ms. Maze, Storybook Maze
Ms. Maze was inspired to become a librarian after an afternoon spent reading books to her nieces on a front stoop in Baltimore. Other kids from the neighborhood began gathering to hear the stories and a few of them revealed that they didn’t have any books of their own in their homes. Ms. Maze hoped to share books with anyone who wanted them through her work as a librarian, but she quickly identified disparities in library access.
“The same kids I was reading to on my front stoop aren’t necessarily the ones I see in the library,” Ms. Maze says. “I realized that there’s a big need for outreach”
Determined to increase book access for children in need, Ms. Maze recast herself as a “radical street librarian” and set out to “mobilize social media for social change.” With the help of donations and grants, the Storybook Maze Project has hosted free pop-up bookstores, installed shelves filled with free books in laundromats, and stocked free book vending machines in neighborhoods classified as “book deserts.”
Taking a page out of “The Magic School Bus,” Ms. Maze’s next major event is an immersive experience that takes place on (and around) a bus, where kids will be able to sample foods inspired by various different stories.
“A lot of our readers have bad book experiences, so we’re trying to get them engaged again through culinary delight and the magic of storytelling,” Ms. Maze says.
Like a real-life Ms. Frizzle, Ms. Maze sees a bus filled with books as the future of the Storybook Maze Project. She hopes to secure a permanent vehicle that can be used to facilitate many of the organization’s existing programs and activations, ultimately expanding beyond her current audience of elementary school children and hosting literary programming for adults.
Redefining her audience and strengthening her brand are just a few of the things that Ms. Maze looks forward to accomplishing as part of the RECONVENE Accelerator program. She’s also looking forward to getting social media tips from Accelerator judge and acclaimed chef Sophia Roe, as Ms. Maze strives to spread her message online and fulfill the promise of Baltimore’s former motto: “the city that reads.”
“Books aren’t only just a tool to support literacy,” Ms. Maze says. “We’re also using them as therapy, as self-esteem builders, and to show kids what they can be when they grow up.”
