I'm Virginia Chambers.
I'm a third year, double majoring in government and art
history.
Tom Tom is the founders festival here in Charlottesville.
Tom Tom basically signals the beginning of spring to me.
And it always seems to be the first week when
it's really nice outside.
It's located downtown but we basically
take over the downtown mall.
And I just really think it's a big party about Charlottesville
and about the innovation that we see in small cities today.
There's the summit side, which has professional conferences.
I work on the festival side, and includes the block parties.
And it includes community programming
where Tom Tom partners with entrepreneurs as well
as community organizations to bring programming here
that's really Charlottesville-centric.
A lot of the speakers are brought
in in conjunction with UVA, Batten and Darden,
as well as the college, the provost for the arts
all work together to help bring some of these big names in.
There are so many times when I've
read something interesting on Medium or on BuzzFeed
and then actually looked at our lineup
and be like, "Oh, my gosh, that person's coming."
The intellectual power that gets brought to Charlottesville
and kind of works with and augments the intellectual power
that's already here in Charlottesville
is really almost overwhelming to think about.
We want people to come to Tom Tom from other cities,
other small cities, in and out of Virginia,
and be inspired to go back to their hometowns
and take on big things.
We want them to go back and realize
that just as Charlottesville was able to do it,
their small community can as well.