Guess what? Mindy is back!!

Sorry I lied about my last post on my last entry. I will continue posting. Hope you guys didn’t miss me too much! Well today I presented my research project on Chinatown Youth Initiatives (CYI) to my fellow co-workers. Basically, CYI is a non-profit volunteer-ran organization. It serves as a guide for high school students to develop skills to articulate needs of local communities through community projects. Volunteers are all high school to college students who are from different parts of NYC (such as Chinatown, Long Island, and Coney Island). On August 12, I participated in CYI’s Chinatown Beautification Day. Chinatown Beautification Day is an ongoing clean up event that takes place every once a year. About one-hundred teenagers volunteer each year to clean up the streets of Chinatown using brooms, dustpans, tongs, gloves, and garbage cans. Two volunteers counted the number of cigarette butts they picked up and resulted with at least ninety butts each. Do people smoke a lot or what?! I also interviewed the former executive director of CYI, Jennifer Chang. The interview provided much personal understanding of CYI than online research.

Interesting things I learned from the interview were:
- 1999, CYI was found by Gloria Chan who wanted to promote realization and improvement of the ‘forgotten parts’ of the community.
- CYI is named after Chinatown because Chinatown is used as a lab for young people to practice leadership and community work skills.
- CYI does not have a permanent office space, therefore it is difficult for CYI to stay organized and put.
- All projects are based on ideas of the youth participants. (Chinatown Literacy Project, Interschool Film Forum, and Chinatown Beautification Day)
- Advertisements were mainly through the word of mouth but also through by handing out flyers, and sending emails.
So besides my research project, this will be my last post on this blog for this summer. I had a great working experience here at HSC. Met a group of wonderful people and learned useful skills that would definitely help me in the future. Now I know how to silkscreen, use Illustrator, garden and work with young kids. Hopefully I would keep in touch with the people I’ve met here and develop more skills. Well it’s almost time to end work. Tata! I will be back soon!