When Vicki Saviers reflects on the moment 47 years ago when she married her high school sweetheart, Mark, she said “The day we got married he looked at me and said, ‘We will always be partners.’ He meant that, and we still are.”

The Saviers have lived in Little Rock for 33 years. They were introduced to Arkansas Community Foundation after seeing a brochure with a prominent journalist promoting its services and reached out to the Foundation. Their first fund was opened in 2006.

Seventeen years later, the fund, and their partnership, is still growing strong.

“This form of giving is a great fiduciary vehicle,” said Mark, “Since we started our fund, about 55% of it has been granted; the remaining balance has grown to exceed our original gift amount. Because the funds are structured and invested in a smart way by the Community Foundation, we get to keep giving year after year, in perpetuity.”

The Saviers have made their philanthropy an annual family affair. “When we saw our sons growing up, coming into the job market and starting their own families, we saw this fund as a way to do something meaningful together,” said Vicki. “All the grants we make from our fund are a family
decision. Everyone gets a vote.”

“Our boys and their wives have their own charitable intentions separate from us,” she said. “Which we love, and they often focus on other causes, too. But we all share that original fund with the Foundation, and it allows us a meaningful connection with them.”

“We aren’t very comfortable being in the spotlight about giving,” said Mark. “We believe in tithing. That’s been a driver for us since the beginning of our lives together. We would prefer to give in private, but we hope by talking about Arkansas Community Foundation, it will encourage other families to create their own fund.”

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Vicki adds, “Our sons married women who were raised to be givers, too. They are very active in their own communities and are great role models for our grandchildren. We are grateful for that.”

The couple doesn’t want public recognition in regards to their legacy. Rather, they want to make a difference for the causes they care about. “We just want to see things improve for the people of our state. I want it to be a better place for our grandchildren,” said Vicki. “I’d like for them to
learn and see philanthropy as part of their lives.”

From sewing classes to manufacturing to fashion shows, INTERFORM drives creative expression in Northwest Arkansas

By Adena White

What began as Northwest Arkansas Fashion Week and the Arkansas Arts and Fashion Forum, has evolved into a multifaceted nonprofit organization that operates at the intersection of art, fashion, and community. INTERFORM transcends the conventional boundaries of fashion recognizing it as a vehicle to connect people across cultures, make the industry more attainable, and empower artists and designers to realize their creative potential.

With a background in contemporary art, INTERFORM founder and CEO Robin Atkinson has worked in the nonprofit creative space her entire career. It wasn’t until she took the helm of NWA Fashion Week in 2016 that she began to understand the transformative potential of fashion.

“People connect to fashion in a way they simply do not connect to art,” she said. “Fashion is a way for people to self-identify and self-represent while also engaging with one another.”

A Three-Part Model of Creative Expression

INTERFORM programs are categorized into three areas that Atkinson likens to the three evolutionary stages of a creative’s educational path: learn, make and show.

LEARN INTERFORM offers free classes and workshops that teach sewing and apparel skills at a variety of levels. Courses range from a beginner sewing course that introduces fundamentals such as threading needles and making basic patterns to a clothing design course that dives deeper into elements of fashion design.

Daymara Baker, chief operating officer at INTERFORM, said the majority of the students participating in the courses are immigrants and refugees, most of whom are non-native English speakers or don’t speak English at all. Because apparel education and fashion design primarily involve tactile, hands-on learning, language differences are not a major issue.

“We’ve managed to find a way to create coursework that resonates with anybody who comes in contact with it, as well as creating a safe space for students, designers, and other artists to share their talents,” Baker said.

MAKE “Make” is the second step of the cycle and INTERFORM’s newest initiative. The organization offers small-batch production in its sewing studio, eliminating a barrier for many designers and creatives who do not have the means or expertise to produce more than one item at a time.

“We can help designers bring their ideas to life,” Baker said. “If a creative jots an idea on a napkin, we can turn that idea into something they can sell.”

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Part of INTERFORM’s vision is to build and sustain a sewn-goods industry in Northwest Arkansas. Training people to develop prototypes and produce garments through its small-batch manufacturing operation serves as an additional revenue stream for INTERFORM, while making a major part of the fashion ecosystem more attainable. The nonprofit partners with local and global brands to produce and repair fashion products, including serving as the North American headquarters for repairs of Rapha cycling clothing.

“Shortening the supply chains and putting manufacturing back in the realm of possibility for everyday individuals instead of just giant conglomerates is empowering,” Atkinson said. “There is manufacturing capacity and apparel-product development capacity right here at INTERFORM.”

SHOW “Show” is where it all began and is the part of the creative cycle where participants involved in INTERFORM’s “learn” and “make” programs can test-drive their ideas, express themselves and showcase their apparel to a captive audience. This entails NWA Fashion Week as well as a recently launched art and fashion biennial called ASSEMBLY.

As INTERFORM’s primary fundraiser, NWA Fashion Week enables the nonprofit to generate revenue through sponsorships and ticket sales, ensuring it is financially viable in the future. The longstanding, public facing-event takes fashion and apparel as a specific form of artistic production and creates a community around it, giving the local creative community an opportunity to get involved in Northwest Arkansas’ burgeoning fashion industry.

“There is something magical about an organization that does such deep community work but then occasionally does something super splashy, fun, and beautiful with a high-production value,” Atkinson said. “Marrying those two worlds has been the magic behind INTERFORM. We believe in always doing both.”

By Kim Dishongh

Lydia Davis’ husband died in 2013, and she struggled to make it through the days, weeks and months without him.

“There was no outreach out there that I could pull from and after being married for 50 years I was just totally devastated,” said Davis, who lives in Dumas. “I didn’t know what to do.”

She tried to keep busy, but evenings were a challenge. For three years, she came home from work and cut all the grass from her lawn each day instead of going inside to the quiet and loneliness.

“It came to me that I needed to start something for other people,” she said.

In November 2013, she started hosting dinners at a church, inviting people, mostly women, to just come and eat together and spend time consoling one another and enjoying companionship.

In 2017, she opened the doors to the nonprofit, Widows Empowering Widows and Reaching Others. It was formed as a support group for other widows who needed an outlet while helping others. One of their goals was to provide grief counseling through quilting projects and community service.

A year later, she bought a long-arm quilting machine and set out to use it to raise money for the organization. The money, she hopes, will allow for more service to the community.

Over the summer, between May and August, the organization offered keyboarding lessons for children.

“I’m interested in music, and we need music in our community, like anything else,” said Davis, who through the organization, bought several keyboards and headsets for the classes. “We need musicians in our churches, and we need children to learn music.”

Her son, she recalled, took piano lessons and easily used that skill to play the saxophone. There is also some strong research linking music skills and brain development and academic skills.

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“I taught them the basics so they can start trying to put together the keys so they can make a melody,” she said.

The Widows Empowering Widows and Reaching Others quilting circle meets on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday each week, with four or five regulars gathering to keep each other company and to create quilts in a multitude of colors and patterns.

“We make them, and we sell them and we put the money back in the treasury,” she said. “This is the money we’re going to use to help the widows and unfortunate people.”

The widows in the quilting circle learn from one another, none of them were master quilters before joining this circle. Davis has brought in people to teach them, as well.

“They’re all beautiful when they’re done,” said Erma Evans, who has been part of the circle since its inception. “I come up here and be with these ladies. I enjoy piecing the quilts, and I enjoy the company.”

Shirley Thrash was later in joining, but she brings the skills she gained from sewing clothing for herself and her children as they grew.

“I was still working and didn’t come as often as I should have. I travel a lot. but I’m down here when I can, said Thrash. “I did a lot of stitching with my mom while she was here. I’m trying to relearn it now. There were a lot of things I forgot.”

The time they spend together, making comforting, warm quilts for others, brings warmth and comfort to them as well. “We just sit here, and we talk… it’s really a lot of fun,” Davis said. “It’s really enjoyable.”

Davis hopes to expand the organization into the building next door and create an area in the Widows Empowering Widows building where widows — or others — can teach children’s music lessons and offer some mentoring and homework help as well.

“We want to empower widows to reach out and do things for other folks,” said Davis. “That’s my whole goal, to help this community. We want to come together and draw ideas and feel good about what we’re doing in life. This is what I really want to see happen in this town.”

Through inspiring performances, educational initiatives, and collaborative efforts, Srividya Venkatasubramanya and her team at Ra-Ve Cultural Foundation have worked to create a vibrant, inclusive space in Bentonville where Indian arts and cultural traditions thrive and connections flourish.

Venkatasubramanya is the founding president and executive director of Ra-Ve Cultural Foundation, a nonprofit she established to promote and celebrate Indian performing arts in Northwest Arkansas. Upon moving to Bentonville with her family 15 years ago, she found it difficult to feel a sense of belonging in her new home, even among people who shared her cultural heritage.

“There was a very big gap in being accepted for who I was,” she said.

Although popular culture — specifically Hindi cinema commonly referred to as Bollywood — is a way for many Indian Americans to connect with one another, she believed an overemphasis on these movies eclipsed the traditional dance and music that defined her upbringing. In 2009, she and a friend established an annual event called Sargam to promote and celebrate traditional Indian performing arts.

“A lot of Indian families in the area were investing in traditional dance and music classes, but when it was time for a public performance, they would do Bollywood-inspired acts,” she said. “I wanted to give status to traditional Indian performing arts and show that those performances did not only have to be relegated to private viewing.”

What started as a mission to connect Indians to their cultural heritage evolved into a need to connect immigrants with the broader community. Personal and business challenges in 2016 led Venkatasubramanya to pivot Sargam from an annual event to a cultural organization that would help remove barriers between Indian and non-Indian residents.

“There is something out there that’s not allowing us to connect,” she said. “So the idea of Ra-Ve was to overcome these barriers. It was not just about music and dance, but music and dance makes it a little easier to connect, perhaps.”

The name Ra-Ve is a portmanteau of her parents’ names, who died unexpectedly within months of each other in 2016.

“I named it for my parents because ultimately, sustaining a culture and keeping a culture alive is very much a parenting thing,” she said. “You have to be relentless.”

Through inspiring performances, community showcases, classes, food, and clothing, Ra-Ve Cultural Foundation brings a piece of India to Northwest Arkansas. The nonprofit is housed in the Kalaloka Institute of Fine Arts, or KIFA, which serves as the hub for Indian dance, music and theater in the area. Located at 1380 Southwest Westpark Drive in Bentonville, KIFA offers classes, performances, workshops, informal gatherings and jam sessions.

Many of Ra-Ve’s team members can share a personal story about how the nonprofit connected them and their families with others in the community and gave them an avenue to celebrate their cultural heritage.

Harini Jayachandran is Ra-Ve’s community outreach coordinator. She attended dance and music performances with her grandmother while growing up in India and was able to provide her children with the same opportunity through Sargam. She enrolled her daughter into the dance school and eventually began volunteering and later working for Ra-Ve.

Karthika Mohan Sheela serves as Ra-Ve’s logistics and programming coordinator and supports the organization’s human resources and marketing functions. Before acquiring her work visa, Sheela decided to fill her time pursuing her passion for Indian performing arts. She was naturally drawn to Ra-Ve and its mission to bring the classical arts of India to the area and eventually became an instructor at KIFA. An opportunity arose for Sheela to apply her human resource expertise to the nonprofit.

Vinitha Vijayam Ramakrishnan is a volunteer coordinator for Ra-Ve Cultural Foundation. She participated in Ra-Ve’s events as a classical Indian dancer, and her son also was involved with the organization. After serving as a volunteer, she began working for the organization to support fundraising and development.

As Ra-Ve continues to grow, Venkatasubramanya is hopeful that the organization will garner support from individuals and corporations outside the Indian community.

“In five years, we have been able to uplift the Indian community in Northwest Arkansas, whether it’s in terms of recruiting Indian immigrants to work in the nonprofit sector, collaborating with other local organizations, and promoting Indian arts and culture,” she said. “Our hope is that we can build our support among individuals and corporations in the region — not just the Indian community — so that we can continue to contribute to Northwest Arkansas’s vibrant arts and cultural scene.”

Driving past the old Brandon House furniture building in Little Rock on her way to graduate school classes, Dr. Patrice Bax dreamed about the opportunities that could be offered inside.

Bax knew that various modes of art to express feelings and share experiences could be life-altering for kids, especially those at-risk.

Brandon House Cultural Center may not be in the location where Bax originally imagined, but it provides spaces for children and adults alike to learn and create things they may not have even realized possible, just like she had hoped.

Bax and her parents, Dr. Pamela and Paul Bax, and her brother, Dion Bax, founded Brandon House Cultural and Performing Arts Center in 2010.

One of their pilot programs was DreamStarters, which began in 2016 at a charter school. Through DreamStarters, students ages 6 to 11, get to learn about visual arts and music through lessons infused with reading comprehension, math and science.

“The Dream Starters program really takes time to expose kids to all types of art, so they can explore where their talent is. It gives them a taste of what it is to be in the realm of being an artist and creating art,” said Bax.

DreamStarters meets after school in a small house on 12th Street, but soon that program will be relocated to Brandon House’s suite of facilities further west, on Colonel Glenn, where the organization expanded a couple of years ago. The relocation will allow them to raise the enrollment capacity for DreamStarters, just as the new digs have allowed the organization to grow its offerings beyond the original creative program that focused on youth.

“The expansion has allowed us to branch out. We can do more programming and meet the needs of our artists and creative professional community as well,” said Bax. “It allowed us to have our own production suite. We have a photography lab, video editing suite, podcasting station, music studio, vocal booth, a media lab, and then also an event space. We also have a theater, a dance hall, another production studio for choir and band rehearsals, a café area, art gallery and an art lab and a gift shop.”

The pandemic, of course, put a hold on face-to-face instruction for a while, and the pause gave Brandon House’s staff an opportunity to “think through some new things,” according to Bax. This “re-thinking” led to the plans for career and workforce training along with creative services for small businesses.

“We started with just creative programs, but it birthed a whole other area of service and support that we offer to the community,” said Bax. “We want to serve the community in general, but we had to pace ourselves in how we did it.”

Brandon House leaders are also considering new ways to generate revenue for the organization.

Their newly-opened event space, for example, is available for public use, and they offer services to artists, musicians and other creative professionals, including marketing, branding and promotions.

“Half of our team is split between my contracted staff who have those experiences and programming staff, those who work with youth,” said Bax.

The production suite, where vibrant murals painted by local artist Jose Hernandez, color the walls of hallways and pods. It contains spaces for a gaming system and a media editing suite, a podcast space and a photography pod. Across the hall is a vocal booth, where students can learn the ins and outs of audio production.

“What I’ve seen is the opportunity to kind of [allow students] to just be themselves,” Bax said of the kids who come to Brandon House. “It’s a fun space, and they get a chance to learn. We never pressure anyone to stick to one thing, which is why we have different activities every day.”

Kids arrive for afternoon activities at 4:30 p.m.

“I like creating music, and I like taking pictures of things,” said Destiny Jeffries, 12, during a recent session. “I like cityscapes, especially.”

Her friend, Rayleigh Ashford, 11, has not yet decided what activity she likes most.

“I like to check out everything,” she said.

That kind of exploration is encouraged, Bax said. The students who come after school and during the summer get a chance to dabble in various types of arts to see what sparks their interest. The lessons learned through Brandon House are intended to give them a way to process how they see their surroundings and, eventually, to find a voice or outlet to share their thoughts and opinions with the world.

“We cooked and made videos, and we made a podcast,” said Rayleigh.

Making podcasts involves making decisions about what topics to cover, what to call the show, and who to interview.

“For one podcast we interviewed each other — and we would just talk on the show about music and other stuff,” said Destiny.

“The thing I want to focus on is acting,” said Jordin Walden, 12. “I really like acting, and I have drama in school.”

Jordin has participated in Brandon House’s drama program, “Act Out,” as well as “Youth Voices Impact Change.” The latter pairs teens with adults who can guide them in creative expressions about social concerns, using multi-digital media and mixed art.

“I think all in all, kids come out with a better perception of themselves,” Bax said. “And they find a place where they feel accepted for who they are.”

Tony Anderson, Brandon House’s producer, is a chef, and manages the organization’s new artistic café. He leads Monday afternoon’s “Let’s Eat” classes, which include conversations about nutritional facts and tips for safe preparation.

“Sometimes I’m learning new things, and I’ll teach the kids the new things,” said Anderson. “We give them the freedom to be creative. Like yesterday we did charcuterie boards. I gave them a variety of ingredients and gave them a template and told them to go from there.”

He sometimes assigns a theme and lets kids prepare meals that dovetail with those themes. For example, a game night theme might mean serving pizza or sliders.

There is a “Fall In” event at Brandon House every other weekend, giving students who are not a part of the after-school activities an opportunity to “fall in” to activities outside the school week.

“Our large events space is one of our best assets,” Bax said. “It gives us a chance to open our space to the community and also to showcase the work that we’ve done with students and local artists.”

In the future, our café area will be a place for single-stage events or open-mic events.

“We have a saxophonist and when he wants to do a jazz show or something he can do that in here,” Bax said.

There is a majorette dance team at Brandon House, and a choreographer will coordinate fee-based dance classes.

Allan Boston might be one of Brandon House’s strongest supporters. Boston found his way to Brandon House while he was in high school, through what was then a pilot program called “I Have Unique Skills to Learn and Earn” (iHustle).

“After growing up where I did and where I went to school, I was like, ‘I am not going to get tied up with any of this.’ I started doing things at Brandon House and I never wanted to leave. I still don’t want to leave,” said Boston. “We introduce kids to graphic design, multimedia artistry, podcasting, videography, cinematography, photography, personal branding…among other things. We all had an opportunity to try. I went because I had a dream of being a photographer.”

As a student, Boston was surprised when Bax handed him a camera and ushered him off with instructions to take video and photographs of an event, and he rose to the occasion.

Boston helped recruit other teens to iHustle, and together they made a video to promote the organization’s Arts Over Tobacco initiative, encouraging kids to turn their focus from nicotine to creativity. That video led to other videos for other purposes, which spawned further opportunities. Boston built his confidence and his skills through Brandon House, and now he shares his knowledge with the students who are coming up behind him.

Almost seven years after he first arrived at Brandon House, Boston is on staff as videographer and event center auxiliary support.

Through Brandon House’s programs, he said, he learned about accountability, punctuality and how to work with a team as well as some of the skills that brought him there in the first place.

“I hope I’ve made a notable mark here at Brandon House,” he said. “They granted me opportunity after opportunity. I’m trying to give them a decade and then a decade more.”