Moving Forward in Philadelphia

It's a bit cold here in Philadelphia but the energy and enthusiasm surrounding our project continues to grow.

 

Yesterday, I cleared my calendar and went to SEAMAAC's satellite office (primary meeting space for our New Routes work) to have Jook with the SEAMAAC staff and elders. After a bit of time in the subway and then a daunting wait for the number 47 bus, I finally made it to the site, complete with numb fingers and ears. I promise you, nothing is better than great company and delicious rice porridge with ginger, scallions and a dash of black pepper on a freezing morning.

To learn more about SEAMAAC's innovative community building Jook Breakfast, please  visit the SEAMAAC web site.

After completing multiple training sessions, our elders have mastered the camera and interview skills to permit our project to move to the next step. In preparation for the New Routes Conference in March, we’ve put together a sneak-peak behind the scenes video that will be shown to our national New Routes colleagues as well as shared with the local community here in Philadelphia via our blog, WHYY’s Learning Lab site, and media distribution focal points such as Youtube, Facebook and Daily Motion.

Our project participants continue to build upon the media skills learned from their role in our work. One elder recently spoke to media and community leaders at a policy event in Washington D.C. In collaboration with SEAMAAC staff, the elders have also created an impressive tri-lingual (English, Laotian, and Vietnamese) newsletter that provided content about personal safety and crimes, healthy living skills, and other community related news. This newsletter has been distributed to various community based organizations that serves the Southeast Asian community.

Our partnership has been going strong. To ensure the continual flow of information, we utilize emails, phone conferences, and face-to-face meetings to keep each other updated with various facets of the project.  Furthermore, to maximize our efforts, individual team members working on a particular focus of the project will often meet independently to engage in the work and then share the results with the group. As of late, the entire team has been busy preparing for the upcoming national gathering. Everyone has been at work, assembling presentations, assisting with content submissions and doing touch-ups on some great looking photographs. Giang, Ethan and Yuko look forward to representing the entire team at the March conference.

Ending this brief report, and to present as a reflection on the significant value of community engagement work, I would like to share with you a comment that a elder community member said to me at the breakfast event:

“I don’t come here for the food. It is the sense of community. These relationships are what count for me because if we do not enjoy them in this moment, they might not be here tomorrow.”

 

Topics: Building Community, Capacity Building, Citizenship, Education, English Language Learning-ELL, Ethnic Media, Health Care Access, Immigrants, Journalism, Language