It’s been four years since John “Vietnam” Nguyen drowned while trying to save a friend on Lake Mendota. For friends and family, the loss has been great. But the memory and passion of the University of Wisconsin-Madison student lives on.
JVN Day 2016 will celebrate the life and legacy of Nguyen with numerous events on Aug. 27-28 across campus. The JVN Project was first organized in October of 2012. It was a way for his friends to honor his life as well as mourn.
“After we lost him, we knew we wanted to create something. We didn’t know what it would be, but we knew good would come out of it,” says Zhalarina Sanders, executive director of the JVN Project.
The non-profit group seeks to use hip-hop as a tool for social change, community uplift and youth development, using Nguyen’s life as an example.
A star of the First Wave Spoken Word and Hip Hop Learning Community, Nguyen, widely known as John Vietnam, was an enormously talented sophomore. The youngest son of a Vietnamese refugee, he was involved in numerous organizations around campus since he came to UW-Madison from his hometown of Chicago.
The two-day festival will begin with a sunrise ceremony from 8 to 11 a.m. Aug. 27 at Memorial Union Terrace and will conclude with a concert by The Goldmine from 9 to 11 p.m. Aug. 28, also at the Terrace. The festival also includes movie screenings, award ceremonies, service initiatives and more.
The mission of this festival is to inspire innovation by facilitating connections between communities that would not normally interface. Through this festival, organizers hope to effect change by providing participants opportunities to engage the tenets of hip-hop culture and understand that creativity is how we best generate solutions.
