PEACE FOLKZ, until next time!

FISTS UP at graduation!

SADI GALI by Tanu weds Manu, sung by Lehmber Hussainpuri—courtesy of fellow CAAAV'er Shahana!

UGH I'M TIRED

One of my favorite funny tracks... TREATS by The Novelists

LOOK@MYSICKSNAPBACK—Oh, and REFLECTION

THANKS FOR THE RECOMMENDATION JONATHAN—FIRST THINGS FIRST by blu & exile

STP Snapback

ORIENTATION RECAP—BEWARE, IT'S 12 MIN. LONG!

Here's a new track... SMASH N' GRAB by Power Struggle!

HEY, HEY!!

The Fellows lookin' good with them fists in the air!!

WHAT'S GOOD?! Hey Nicole, if you read this I'm gonna do a written post first to start it off since there's a lot of stuff to mention in my first post—second post will be a video, don't worry!!

Okay, the name's Jeff (Jeffrey), and this summer I'm a fellow for the National Fellowship for Asian American Organizing (for more information click here)!

I wanna start off this post by thanking Mr. Eugene Lang and the Eugene Lang Opportunity Award program for partially funding my participation in the fellowship. I wouldn't have the privilege to do such great community work and organizing this summer without the award, so I'm MAD GRATEFUL, like INSANELY GRATEFUL—THANK YOU LOTS!!

Alright, so to get straight to it... I'm in Alameda right now, which is next to Oakland and in the Bay Area of California. I took a mad-long plane trip here for a weeklong fellowship training with my co-fellows from both the East and West Coast! This is the first time I'm traveling out of the Northeast, so I'm so siked to explore in addition to getting to know my co-fellows during our week of intensive trainings. I just got here yesterday, so nothing's really happened yet, but I'll totally be including my experience in my next blog post!

To touch on the work I've been doing through the fellowship @ CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities in the Lower East Side of Manhattan...

I'm continuing to work with CAAAV's high school youth program ASIAN YOUTH IN ACTION (AYA) throughout the summer, and since January when I started as an Assistant Coordinator through Fed. Work Study I've gotten to build with some really kick-ass youth that are continually inspiring me to be the best organizer I can be for them. When I'm working with these youth, I'm feeding off their energy, their exceptional skills and thinking, and their passion to improve their communities and I'm just at-loss sometimes because I can't believe I'm just working with such a great bunch. Reminds me a lot about the high school program I did called the Chinese Youth Initiative in Boston where my peers and I did our best together to be a voice for Asian American youth and the Boston Chinatown community in the MOVEMENT.

What I'll be continuing doing with AYA is developing our summer curriculum for the new cohort of participants and conducting workshops and skill trainings with them, which includes working with them to deconstruct the systems of oppression, community organizing, and all that other jazz. I'll be alongside our Head Youth Coordinator Ruben An and our newest Coordinator Intern K.C. Ho in this journey, and we're expecting a helluva summer, hehe!

I'm also working with CAAAV's Chinatown Tenants Union (CTU) this summer, which is currently our only tenant contingent (CAAAV just got more $ to do PUBLIC HOUSING work, so stay tuned!). My role so far has been to build with tenants who are at-risk of being displaced from their homes in the Chinese American community because of whack landlords who wanna make bank from their suffering. For those of y'all who don't know, landlords will tend to displace their lower-paying tenants to fix their building up all nice and stuff to rent out to more affluent folk. It's messed up because WHERE THESE DISPLACED TENANTS GONNA LIVE?!

DON'T YOU ANSWER THAT WITH SOMETHIN' WHACK AS F**K!

The past week I've gone door-knocking for a lil' bit with our newest CTU organizer Wai Yee to meet some Chinatown tenants CAAAV's been working with. I haven't done much besides that and calling tenants to attend our monthly CTU meeting, but I'm expecting my role to grow bigger and be more concrete as the summer continues. OH WAIT, I'm sorry—I actually lied. I have been doing more... I'm actually on CAAAV's Rezoning Committee, and last week we talked with our core CTU members about suggestions regarding educating the Chinatown community about rezoning and why it's mad important (I'm gonna save explaining rezoning for the next blog post... I've written a ton already...).

LAST THING—I'm gonna leave a link to a track I'll be listening to while reading or videoing each blog post just because I wanna add something else to these posts that might be more fun than all the text or me talking, haha (it might, might not be relevant to what's in my post). OKAY, so this post's track is PUT IT ON THE LINE, by CHOPS, Prometheus Brown, and Bambu.

PEACE! And see y'all who might be readin', watchin', or listenin' the next time I post.