Autumn passing by

Almost 4 months at my site has passed. And soon enough my favorite season will be gone with all the leaves falling to the ground and bitter cold to come.

For these past months of Oct and November, my biggest focus is my org's Asian Pacific American Leadership Symposium for high schoolers. I've been trying many outreach methods to high school principals, teachers, counselors, students and community orgs to allow students to take a day off from school to attend this event at UMASS Boston. The discouraging thing is that everyone loves the program and what we're doing (workshops on APA identity, history, culture and building networks and supports for both high school students and youth workers). However, many of the schools (with high Asian American student population) we relied on in the past are now resistant to allow adults and students to attend this event as a field trip (because it focuses more on leadership development and not what is relevant in the hs curriculum.) Ironically, this is why we've had the symposium in the past, to share our resources to hs students who aren't exposed to contents of Asian American experience and studies to connect to their work at schools and in their communities.

I also helped with the adult workshop which I was going to co-facilitate, however I will not be around for the day of the symposium (Nov 20). The adult workshop is designed to focus on youth immigration issues: bilingual education, anti-asian sentiments and access to education for undocumented youth. This symposium is really important because it is a kick off event for the year to get more students involved with CAPAY or their communities; and to stay connected with schools and communities. I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope for 100 plus attendees; as my supervisor has said, people always register last minute, so you have to have faith that they will come.

While I was doing this project I realize as I was going through my org's database, that it's time for update of contacts and the database all together. So I will probably be working with Filemaker, because this is what they are still using (version 6.0). Hopefully I can figure out how to sync this program to send out e-mail blasts. This will take some time figuring out (especially if I can transfer files.)

Well, I will be leaving for Italy (Venice, Florence, Rome) this Saturday for 10 days.This will take off two wks of my November and soon enough the Holiday season will storm through. Ciao!