Pomona College

HighlightsHighlights

2009-20102009-2010

Asian AmericanAsian American

Resource CenterResource Center

of theof the

The Asian American Resource Center (AARC), established in 1991, helps Asian Pacifi c American (APA) students develop intellectually, socially, personally, academ-ically and politically. Central to all pro-grams, projects and events, is the value of developing leadership skills among APA students. Working in conjunction with the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies, the AARC creates opportunities to raise awareness of issues affecting Asian Americans and Pacifi c Islanders. The AARC works in collaboration with other ethnic groups, academic departments and campus of-fi ces to sponsor a wide range of educa-tional endeavors. By fostering awareness of APA issues at Pomona College, the AARC helps strengthen the Claremont Colleges and the greater community.

MISSION STATEMENT

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The AARC is committed to engaging the Inland Valley and Los Angeles Asian American and Pacifi c Islander community. We believe that

participation in the local community will help to enhance the educational experience that our stu-dents receive while at the same time promoting responsibility and accountability to community

building. Examples of our commitment to ser-vice have been our engagement with the South-east Asian Community Alliance (SEACA) with

the RiseUp! project. RiseUp! works with the youth of the LA Chinatown/Lincoln Heights area. The workshops include creative writing

and expression, as well as community and family histories. In 2010, the AARC began a tutoring

and mentoring program for local Inland Empire Tongan Youth through a partnership with the First Tongan Methodist Church of Pomona.

Pomona students volunteered every week-end, tutoring youth, high-school students, and

college-aged students. Furthermore, the AARC partnered with the Tongan Community Ser-

vice Center and the First Methodist Church to sponsor a Health Fair. Finally, the AARC is fully

committed to encouraging API Pomona Col-lege students to engage in service to the broader API community through numerous independent

projects, studies, and internships.

serviceservice

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2009-2010

The Rise Up! Program is a collaboration between the AARC and the South East Asian Community Alliance (SEACA) based in Chinatown, Los Angeles. Rise Up! is an after school program for inner city high school youth to empower youth by harnessing various means of express-ing themselves through video and writing. While touching on the importance of media to infl uence peoples’ everyday lives, the youth are provided technical skills to fi lm and edit their own short fi lms. We wanted to let youth take charge of producing their own narratives in a fun, engag-ing environment. After seven weeks of workshops, the youth produced fi nal video projects to be presented in front of their community, family, and friends.

RiseUp! Los Angeles

-Winnie Wong ‘11

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- Charlotte Chang ‘10

The Saturday Tongan Education Program (STEP) is a project coordinated by James Yang (PO ‘10), Charlotte Chang (PO ‘10), Christine Kho (PO ‘11), and Sefa Aina. STEP worked with Tongan youth in the local Pomona Valley area, provid-ing academic support and counseling for the students. This program was made possible with the support of the Tongan Community Service Center (TCSC) and the energetic and committed students who volunteered as tutors. With the TCSC, the STEP planning committee organized a Health Fair which included 2010 Census outreach, legal immigration aid advising, free mammograms, and youth activities. With the STEP program, the AARC hopes to directly serve and build relationships with the local Pacifi c Islander communities.

Saturday TonganEducation program

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The AARC is the most comprehensive resource center for Asian American studies materials at the Claremont Colleges. An important goal for the AARC is to serve the co-curricular develop-ment of our student body. We seek to support the production of new research, periodicals, and videos that help to inform the community of various topics and issues relevant to the Asian American and Pacifi c Islander experience. We produce a resource booklet for Asian Ameri-can and Pacifi c Islander fi rst-years that inform them of the organizations that exist on campus, information about local-Asian ethnic enclaves, and most importantly, information about our fa-vorite Asian restaurants in the area. We also keep updated lists of internships and service opportu-nities geared towards API students. We have also been working on a GIS (Geographic Informa-tion Systems) project that will help us identify Asian American and Pacifi c Islander populations in the Inland Valley area as well as some of their needs. We’ve also produced chat-books that ex-hibit the creative work of Claremont College stu-dents, and produce a student magazine, HYPE (How You Print Empowerment) each semester.

resourcesresources

HYPE (How You Print Empowerment) is an AARC student publication that is produced each semester. It is a space for 5-C students, faculty, alumni, and com-munity members to submit artistic and literary and editorial works on specifi c issues important to the API community. The AARC’s Fall 2009 issue of HYPE featured articles about marriage equality and Queer Rights in the age of President Obama. The Spring 2010 issue featured the themes “Health and Census” to cover two important events taking place nationally and locally: the census tracking and the debate on health care. Our goal with this specifi c publication was to look at the importance of census tracking in the Asian American and Pacifi c Islander community as it relates to commu-nity representation, health care provisions, and future resource distribution. We engaged contributors from the Claremont Colleges as well as community members who did specifi c work with the census and healthcare, such as the California Healthy Nail Salon Collabora-tive, the South East Asian Community Alliance, and the Asian Pacifi c American Legal Center. Some of our committee members were even involved in the census training and tracking process through the generous help of OCAPICA and the Health Fair for Pomona resi-dents put on by the STEP program. We celebrated our publication release with community members who have helped make the publication possible, including Traci Kato-Kiriyama, a former AARC Artist-in-Residence who has recently published a collection of poetry.

- Duyen Tran ‘10

H.y.P.e. Magazine

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Our committee worked with Geographic Informational Systems (GIS) expert Warren Roberts to learn how to use ArcGIS program. This program allows us to create maps to serve as visual representations of ethnic communities, language and income distributions, health care access, and availability to sustainable food. This semester, we mapped free and low-cost clinics within a seven mile radius of the Tongan Methodist Church and created a map to distribute at their health fair. We also collected data this semester that can be passed onto next year’s interns so that they can map API/A ethnic communities in the Inland Valley area and the different health care resources available to them.

- Jamie Navarro ‘11

Community mapping

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The AARC seeks to engage the Pomona College, as well as the larger Claremont Colleges community. We actively outreach to various students

and communities through our pro-grams and other opportunities for

collaboration. We seek to put on in-formed programming that appeals to many different audiences. We’ve also held study breaks, fi lm screenings and have invited experts to speak on many

topics related to the Asian American community and experience. The

AARC also seeks and creates opportu-nities to co-program with other offi ces

and organizations at Pomona College and across the Claremont Colleges.

engagementengagement

The Arts

the relationship between Clare-mont activists and the activist community in the larger Los

Angeles area. Spring semester, we collaborated with the Pacifi c Basin Institute to host monthly

fi lm screenings with the directors of each fi lm present for Question

& Answer sessions afterwards. We also put together a commu-nity art making event, brought Hari Kondabolu (a conscious

comedian), and Nobuko Miya-moto (a performing artist active

in the Asian American move-ment) to campus. Internally, we

did writing exercises during staff meetings and built community

within the organization through the arts. Our arts programming

was successful in bringing out the diversity of the API community

and making the AARC more vis-ible on the Claremont Colleges as

a resource for students.

The Arts Committee seeks to engage and build community among APIs at the Claremont Colleges through spoken words, music, fi lm screenings, and other artistic means. We believe that the arts are an

important avenue through which storytelling, collective learning, and creative performance can create community among students, staff,

community members. Fall semester, we brought out Tuesday Night Cafe and put together a tsunami benefi t concert, which strengthened

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The Filipino American Experiences Committee spent the Fall Semester

researching, meeting with professors, and devel-

oping a comprehensive syllabus for an entirely student-led discussion

course in the Spring of 2010. This group met

weekly with rotating student facilitators who

led discussions about dif-ferent Filipino American

issues. We also brought in three outside facilita-

tors during the course of the semester to lead

discussions about Filipino American history, politi-

cal cartoons, Filipinos and hip hop, and the dynamics

of the intersections of queer and gender identi-

ties in the Filipino-Ameri-can community.

- Jamie Navarro ‘11

Filipino American Experiences

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The MESA (Middle Eastern & South Asian) Committee seeks to in-corporate Middle Eastern and South Asian students into the AARC space through programming that focuses on issues that are particu-larly relevant to those communities. MESA Talks, modeled after last year’s Desi Table, bring students, faculty, and community leaders into lunch-time discussions on a wide variety of issues including art activism, gender and sexuality, disappearing cultures, language, and occupation. In addition to various smaller events like fi lm screen-ings and a trip to the LACMA, the MESA committee organized an activist conference called “Occupation in the Age of Obama” with keynote speaker Anjali Kamat (PO ‘00) and a hip hop concert with ManifestONE and D’Lo.

MESA

- Zeenat Hassan ‘10

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The Asian American Mentor Program (AAMP) is a student-run organization that serves as a resource for incoming Asian Pacifi c Islander (API) students and the larger community. As mentors, we encourage students to explore their identi-ties and fi nd their individual voices. We seek to acknowledge and affi rm aspects of our identities including gender, sexual orientation, class, ability, culture, ethnicity, generation, and religion. With the intersection of these aspects in mind, we work to connect and collaborate with other 5-C organizations to foster awareness among members of our community.

Albert Liu ‘12Annie Calef ‘12Annie Tran ‘12Diana Dao ‘12Emily Chang ‘12Hans Chaumont ‘12Iris Jong ‘12James Heo ‘12Jane Xu ‘12Joyce Lee ‘12

Julie Wu ‘12Kelly Park ‘12Kori VanDerGeest ‘12Kun Wei Song ‘12Natalie Chung ‘11Nate Wilairat ‘11Pauline Wang ‘12Sean Chung ‘12Stella Kim ‘12Thuy Ly ‘12Will Hummel ‘12

AAMP Mentors 2009-2010

Charlotte Chang ‘10Ellen Lê ‘10

Koichi Matsuda ‘10

AAMP Head Mentors 2009-2010

16 AAMPAAMP2009-2010

AAMP

AAMP

AAMP

AAMP

AAMP

AAMP

AAMP- Kelly Park ‘12

The Asian-American Mentor Program (AAMP) serves primarily as a resource for fi rst-year students

by encouraging their engagement in API-related activism. In the 2009-

2010 school year, we organized events for our mentees exploring different aspects of API identity: highlights of our year included a

talent show with performances by various student groups, a speaker panel on the issue of Asian exoti-cism, two retreats, a workshop on

globalization, and an annual pil-grimage to Manzanar. Much of

AAMP's work, however, is achieved through our strong mentor-mentee friendships that foster the intellec-tual and political development of

both mentor and mentee, whether it's through casual meals together

or through late-night conversa-tions about topics ranging from TV shows to the model minority myth.

Asian American Resource Center Professional Staff

Iosefa Aina, DirectorKarin Mak, Program Coordinator

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AARC Interns 2009-2010Christine Kho ‘11

Dayne Lee ‘11Duyen Tran ‘10Dustin Kim ‘10Emi Sawada ‘11James Yang ‘10

Jamie Navarro ‘11Jani Kim ‘10

Kevin Lee ‘12Kim Hartung ‘10Leora Aquino ‘11Samuel Pang ‘12Winnie Wong ‘11Zeenat Hassan ‘10

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Asian American Resource Center

Pomona CollegeSmith Campus Center, Suite 240

170 East Sixth StreetClaremont, CA 91711

Phone: (909) 621-8639 Fax: (909) 607-8513

Email: aarc@pomona.edu

Walk-in Hours: Monday through Friday

9:00 AM to 5:00 PM

Contact:Director: Iosefa Aina, sefa.aina@pomona.edu

Program Coordinator: Karin Mak, karin.mak@pomona.edu

If you would like to be on the AARC’s mailing list, please email aarc@pomona.edu.

Publication edited by Dayne Lee, Karin Mak, and Sefa AinaDesign and layout by Jani Kim

Special Thanks to Duyen Tran, Winnie Wong, Jamie Navarro, Kelly Park, Charlotte Chang, and Zeenat Hassan

for their contributions to this edition of Highlights.

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