Transmission Project

The core mission of CAPAY itself is essentially to develop the capacity (knowledge, skills, voices, leadership) of Asian American youth to be pro-active and resourceful agents of positive change for their families, schools, and communities. This central capacity-building goal of CAPAY has not been so readily recognized or rewarded by funders who have neglected Asian American populations overall and focused on provider-client models of service delivery rather than capacity-building. Ann Philbin, whose 1996 quote is used in the CTC VISTA program guidelines, is a longstanding ally in our work, and we continue to value her contributions to the field. Our principles are informed by the literatures and best practices of youth and community development, but we also explicitly value our own indigenous cultural sources. Familiar Chinese poems, for example, advise: “Don’t be seduced by the moment; fight for what will have value in a thousand years” and “if you give a hungry person a bowl of rice, s/he can eat for a day; if you teach her how to plant and harvest rice, s/he can eat for a lifetime.” These cultural reference points related maintaining a long-term view and investing in training/education rather than charity/service exemplify how we understand capacity-building.

We have been implementing a media justice project that originally targeted Vietnamese American youth in Dorchester who were already involved with youth service programs offered by agencies in the community. Unexpectedly, however, the two primary Vietnamese American community groups in Boston — the Vietnamese American Civic Association (VACA) and Viet-AID — confronted organizational crises during August-September, resulting in lay-offs, budget cuts, and staffing/board shifts. This left the Vietnamese community with little organizational capacity for youth services, and forced CAPAY to re-focus our own priority on direct youth organizing. Originally, we had intended to partner with VACA and Viet-AID in producing relevant youth media for the local Vietnamese community. Without the structure/support of VACA and Viet-AID, however, we have devoted significant time to reach local Vietnamese American youth and connect them to CAPAY’s youth media programming. This sudden loss of organizational/institutional capacity in the Vietnamese community had many important implications beyond simply affecting CAPAY’s plans for project collaboration, but it provided a valuable lesson regarding the necessity to stabilize our own organizational infrastructure in order to ensure3 the viability of our priority projects.

We intend to expand our media justice-related programming and project work with more direct linkages to youth organizing, and have identified other potential community collaborations while also communicating our continuing interest in working with Viet-AID and VACA. However, given these changing conditions in the local community, combined with the enormous effect of the national/global economic crisis on low-income, immigrant/refugee families, and the parallel reduction of grant resources for the community, CAPAY has held a series of strategic planning discussions with stakeholders during the past six months. Though still underway, consensus has emerged regarding the following goals for organizational development:

1. Maintain programmatic commitments to youth organizing, leadership development, and expression through expressive media justice projects and educational empowerment workshops/symposia.
2. Expand CAPAY’s financial base, including earned income, donations, and grant development.
3. Activate and mobilize CAPAY’s alumni network to provide increased/ongoing resources.
4. Initiate and nurture long-term organizational partnerships in addition to shorter-term project-based collaborations.
5. Make fuller use of Web 2.0 tools to support and streamline organizational communications, mapping of organizational assets (including alumni networking), and outreach/promotion.

CAPAY also received expanded support from the UMass Boston Asian American Studies Program that will continue for an additional two years — enabling CAPAY’s coordinator, Tri Quach, to provide stable overall leadership and direction to the organization and its programming. This is a significant enhancement of CAPAY’s infrastructure, consistent with the longer-term goal of organizational development.