For the past decade, Heaps Decent – the brainchild of Diplo, DJ Levins and Nina Las Vegas – has been trekking across the country to host music workshops in disadvantaged communities.

An Australian spin-off of Diplo’s Mad Decent imprint, the organisation has been crafting a creative outlet for inner-city kids and regional youths alike, with mentors including Sydney dance staples Charlie Chux and Adam Bozzetto. They’ve collaborated on songs and events with everyone from A-Trak to Ice Cube, and this Sunday, there’s another big one on the calendar.

Coinciding with his Australian tour, Diplo will be paricipating in a Q&A titled Discovering, Collabrating and Creating at Giant Dwarf in Sydney, hosted by co-founder Nina Las Vegas. You can grab tickets to the event right here, with all proceeds going to Heaps Decent.

Ahead of the event, OG member and kool dad DJ Levins has looked back at the past 10 years of Heaps Decent and picked out some of his standout moments from across the country, and we’re sure that there’ll be plenty more in the future. Check it out below, and head to Giant Dwarf this weekend to get an insight into Diplo’s career and Heaps Decent:

2007: OUR FIRST WORKSHOPS

Nina and I took Diplo to a juvenile detention centre in Nina’s home town of Wagga Wagga, about six hours inland from Sydney – probably five if you don’t get a pie from that sick bakery in Yass. We hosted a week’s worth of workshops, making music with some of the young guys in the centre.

Diplo made beats while Nina and I helped write lyrics, and by the end of the week we’d made a handful of rough rap tracks. Everyone involved had gotten a lot out of the workshops, especially Nina and I, and we asked Diplo if he could leave his gear with us so we could do these workshops regularly. Heaps Decent was born!

2009: A-TRAK COMES TO WAGGA WAGGA

During the first few years of Heaps Decent we focused mostly on bringing touring artists to remote areas and detention centres to make music. Some of these workshops were more successful than others – any workshop that someone from Spank Rock was involved with was always a highlight – but when A-Trak travelled with us to Wagga Wagga we made what I still think is the best track to come out of a Heaps Decent workshop: ‘Anywhere But Here.’

2010: DETOURS & DESTINATIONS

Our first massive project was a collaboration with Shopfront and The Opera House called Detours & Destinations, which saw us working with Lomandra, a school in Campbelltown for young people with challenging behaviours and emotional disturbances, and Miimali, an Indigenous high school program in Blacktown.

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Three months of working with the young people at Lomandra and Miimali culminated in a performance at The Studio at The Opera House, and an interactive dancefloor that allowed participants to remix the music we made during the program with their feet!

2010: WILCANNIA

One of the biggest inspirations for us to start Heaps Decent was hearing Down River by The Wilcannia Mob on the radio in the early 2000s. I always wanted to work in Wilcannia, and in 2010 during a trip to Broken Hill I was able to make the drive to the 600-person town near the border of NSW, Victoria and South Australia.

I ran workshops at two schools, and at the drop in centre I recorded a track over the ‘Teach Me How To Dougie’ beat, which we called Central Kids. We found funding to return to Wilcannia four times over the next year, and have run even more workshops there each year since. We must be close to 40 Wilcannia trips now? Shouts to Rex airlines.

2011: HOME BASE

Heaps Decent definitely focused on outreach programs that sent our facilitators to rural areas for the most part of our first five years, but we were always doing work in Sydney, working with Key College in Redfern since our first year. In 2010 we partnered with Redfern Community Centre to lock in a regular weekly studio day in which young people who we’ve met at workshops around Sydney and NSW can come and work with us on personal projects.

It’s still running every Monday afternoon today, and has lead to some of the best tracks we’ve made in the last 10 years – some of the young people we met through Home Base have gone on to facilitate Heaps Decent workshops elsewhere!

2011: ICEY PLAYS PARKLIFE

When touring company and festival organisation Fuzzy became our benefactor in 2009, it seriously changed our lives. They provided us with proper financial and admin support and assigned a staff member (we love you Erin) to helping us grow as a charity – Erin helped us become one in the first place!

They were also generous with giving us access to each of the artists on their festival lineups for music workshops, and in 2010 they gave one of the opening slots at Parklife to Icey, a young rapper that we’d met in Wagga Wagga in 2009. He has the final verse on ‘Anywhere But Here.’ Icey played a set of originals alongside some other rappers who’d been working with us at Home Base, plus facilitator Joyride. Even I got up to yell backing ad-libs on one track! It was a great day.

2012: DINNERTIME!

Recorded at St Therese’s Primary School in Wilcannia, this group of 7 year olds was the youngest we’d ever worked with, and we channelled our Play School and Sesame Street upbringings to create some semi educational kid jams. On the day we made songs about animals, the park, holidays, friends and school but the highlight of the day was definitely the rhyme about dinnertime.

The beat is all loops of the kids playing percussion instruments,with a little Adam Bozzetto magic. We asked our friend Georgia Perry to put a video together for us and she put together this amazing animation. One of the coolest thing about making music in a small town is the sharing of the tracks among friends after the workshops – when we returned a few months every kid in town sang along to every word.

2015: HEAPS DECENT PUTS OUT ITS FIRST RELEASE

We always had ambitious plans to become a record label, and in 2015 we finally release something officially – Ravin’s Soulfood EP which was recorded at Home Base with production from Adam Bozzetto, who himself has been an integral part of Heaps Decent since Detours & Destinations. Ravin and Adam put together a super polished and mature EP, which everyone at Heaps Decent is very proud of.

SINCE 2015: WATCHING HEAPS DECENT GROW WITHOUT ME

In 2014, I was trying to balance having a baby, running a restaurant and doing regular Heaps Decent workshops, which were always a nice escape from the stresses of the restaurant. At the end of the year I had to step away from the workshop life. Now I’m just a boring old board member, but watching Heaps Decent to continue to grow and flourish without me there is just a special as being more involved.

We now run a handful of workshops every week all over NSW and have even started expanding beyond that – Nina and a team of facilitators have made their way to NT for a couple of music and dance workshops in the last year. None of this would be possible without the hard work of our staff members Nerida and Charlie, who oversee everything from the massive projects to the never-ending stream of admin work that I always hated and sucked at.

I thank them for everything Heaps Decent has achieved in the last five years, plus our amazing workshop facilitators and generous volunteers. Here’s to another 10 years of being Heaps Decent!