Newsletter

March 2006
Letter from the Chair: Cedric Cheng

Dear Supporters,

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the board of CAPA Community Education Foundation for electing me chair and putting their confidence in me to guide the organization for the next year. I would like to thank all of you for your continued support of the programs of the Ed Fund and hope that your continued support will be there.

Many changes are happening with our organization. This includes having a new program coordinator to help us organize and shape our programs to make them better and more effective. I would like to introduce Doreen Lew who has graciously taken the position and has been very effective. Welcome Doreen!

Of course, a quick announcement, our gala is coming up very soon. Many of you have received our Save the Date postcard in the mail and I hope you put down June 3 as a date reserved for our event. We’re are planning a unique program where we are going to look at folks in our community that are not well known but have contributed greatly to our community. Our theme is about unsung heroes in the Asian Pacific American community. In addition, our Intern Class of 2006 will be introduced and they will be putting on, what has become a gala tradition, their presentation based on our theme. And of course we’ll have our ever popular silent auction of awesomes gifts as well as entertainment and dancing to accentuate the evening The Gala steering committee has been working hard to create a unique and memorable evening. I hope you’ll be a part of it.

Our other goals for this year are to expand our programming in the realm of leadership development. We’re pleased that for our first step, we’ll be putting part of this program with our intern orientation. In the past, we’ve prepared our interns for their assignments for their offices. With this new component, we’ll be preparing them for much more and hopefully our new class will use these new skills and apply them for their future endeavors. But that not all. We’re also planning a seminar for those who are in the workplace and who are interested in refreshing your leadership abilities. We’ll have more information when the details are planned out.

We’re also working with the East Bay Asian Voter Education Consortium (EBAVEC) in continuing our combine efforts to not only register voters but to make sure they are educated on all issues and platforms so that they vote with confidence with having been informed. Our work also brings us to building bridges with our fellow organizations in our neighborhood. Of course our relationship with CAPA doesn’t have to be explained. But we’ve also been building relations with the Diablo Valley Chinese Cultural Association, in which a number of our members are also members of DVCCA. This can only strengthen our bonds as Chinese Americans and to an extent, as part of the larger Asian Pacific American community. We also have friends who are also diligently working on projects that they do passionately. Whether it is the education of Chinese language, like our friends at the Contra Costa Chinese School or in the realm of mental health education and senior citizen programming, like our friend Chia Chia Chien is doing, we have many folks who are doing the work and we may not know it. That’s why, in the long run, it is so important to support each other and support the work. That’s how community advances and that’s how community binds itself to its people.

Cedric Cheng
Chair, CAPA Community Education Fund