On January 14, 2026, more than 850 middle school students from across Wisconsin gathered at the Resch Expo in Ashwaubenon for the Green Bay Packers’ annual Empower leadership event.

The free, day-long program is designed to help sixth through eighth grade students develop leadership skills, mental strength, and confidence so they can create positive change in their schools and communities.

But during this year’s event, leadership development included something unexpected: literacy and word choice.

Through a partnership with Rhymes With Reason (RwR), students explored how language, storytelling, and vocabulary can shape how leaders communicate and influence others.

The Packers’ Empower event has become an important part of the organization’s community impact work. Each year, the program invites students from around the state to participate in a series of workshops and activities focused on leadership development.

This year, our workshop added a literacy dimension to that conversation.

"In the middle of January of 2026, I pulled up to a snowy Lambeau field, feeling like I was about to suit up for a Packers playoff football game, but in reality, I was about to suit up at the Resch Expo Center (across the street from Lambeau) to go lead a group of 850 excited Wisconsin middle schoolers to get them amped up about literacy to jumpstart their second semester of the 2025-26 school year." 

During the Empower event, Read Rhymes with Reason founder Austin Martin led workshops for the 850+ students in attendance, starting with an impassioned speech about his own leadership journey in starting Rhymes with Reason as a college kid.

From here, three 45 minute workshops began.

During the first phase of the workshops students learned vocabulary from popular songs that were grouped by football positions. We called this phase “Language of Excellence.”

For example–the first lesson revolved around the “Quarterback” as students learned the words:
Accurate, Methodical, Efficient, Resilient, and Composed.

But students got to learn the vocabulary from artists like Drake and J. Cole, as one of the lessons revolved around his usage of the word “accurate”

“Searching for what I could say
That accurately could convey
The way that I feel in the word
That's different than what you done heard”

Phase 2 of the workshop was dubbed “Voices of Influence” as students voted on which of their favorite artists they wanted to learn from for the next phase. The majority of the students chose a playlist that consisted of Tyler the Creator, Rihanna and Justin Bieber and students got to learn vocabulary terms from each of these artists’ hit songs.

In Phase 3, students had a “word wall” comprised of the vocabulary words they had learned from “Language of Excellence” and “Voices of Influence” and they were tasked with the daunting (but exciting) challenge to put at least 3 of the new words that they learned into a rap related to leadership, and perform it in front of their entire peer group on the big stage.

Students came up with some unforgettable rhymes and were jazzed up about their learning experience in a way that was frankly rare, but extremely special to see.

According to Packers Community Outreach Manager Amanda Wery, the response from students and educators was immediate.

“Teachers and schools immediately started reaching out asking how they could get this into their classrooms because of the connection to music and how different it felt from other programs,” Wery said.

The combination of leadership themes with rhythm and storytelling created a learning experience that stood out from traditional presentations.

One activity at the conference asked students to write “I will” leadership statements — commitments they wanted to make as leaders in their schools.

It revealed an unexpected challenge.
“We’d have students try to make ‘I will’ statements at this leadership conference to set goals and we noticed they were challenged by actually writing these out,” Wery explained. “And we learned that their apprehension was around spelling and knowing how to use the words they were going to put on a board to be shared with others.”

For many students, the hesitation wasn’t about leadership ideas — it was about confidence with language.
Adding Rhymes With Reason’s literacy-focused workshop helped address that barrier.

“By adding Rhymes with Reason to the conference, students are learning about leadership but also having that underlying reading and literacy component to help them understand and succeed with the ask,” Wery said.

One reason the partnership worked well was its collaborative approach.
Rather than bringing a fixed program to the event, Rhymes With Reason worked with the Packers to adapt the workshop to fit the Empower conference structure and goals.

Wery said that flexibility made the program easy to integrate into the event.


“Austin was great about not saying ‘this is what we have.’ It was always ‘how can RwR work within your space to make the most for your students?’ which made it very easy to say yes to the program because we knew they would work with us quickly to make the program turnkey for the Packers.”

That collaborative approach allowed the literacy component to complement the event’s leadership programming rather than compete with it.

Programs like Empower highlight the growing role professional sports organizations can play in supporting youth education.

When teams bring together students, educators, and community leaders, they create opportunities to introduce new ideas and experiences that students might not encounter in traditional classroom settings.

In this case, literacy became part of a broader conversation about leadership.

Students left the event not just thinking about what leaders do — but how words, language, and communication help leaders influence others.

The Packers Empower event demonstrated how community partnerships can connect leadership development with literacy engagement in ways that resonate with students.

For the 850 middle school students who attended, the day offered more than leadership lessons. 

It gave them a new way to think about how the words they choose — and the confidence they have in using them — can shape the kind of leaders they become.