Giving Season
We are entering the giving season. I want to share and highlight the amazing nonprofit organizations that I’ve partnered up and worked with extensively this year. Please check them out and support them, however you can.
1000 Cranes for Recovery is a community partnership platform helping to raise awareness, educate, and promote wellness for one thousand mental health advocates utilizing cultural humility to better serve the Asian American community. We’ve partnered up to provide mental health and arts workshops for the Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean-speaking communities in Los Angeles County. We’ll be teaching educational and preventive mental health information along with showing participants how to fold origami cranes. One of the goals is to have the community members fold one thousand origami cranes and display them to symbolize hope and recovery.
Colorado Succeeds uses their unique business expertise, leadership skills, and influence to improve Colorado schools. I’ve been providing a series of DEI workshops for their staff. Their proactive initiatives and commitment to continual growth and improvement in the areas of DEI as an organization make my job extremely rewarding, exciting, and fun.
DIRT Coffee is a local, women-run social enterprise nonprofit with the mission of bringing you quality crafted Huckleberry coffee, food, and drink while training, employing, and empowering neurodivergent individuals through workforce development programming.
I was just at DIRT Coffee last month. It’s located in Historic Downtown Littleton, Colorado. DIRT Coffee just opened a second store in East Denver in October. If you are around these neighborhoods, please go check them out and say “hi” to Catharina, the Executive Director of DIRT Coffee.
FACT stands for Filipino Americans Coming Together and is a conference hosted annually by the Philippine Student Association at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is the largest Filipino-interest conference in the Midwest, bringing in about 1,300 delegates just last year. The conference works to empower young, rising professionals while simultaneously educating the delegates about Filipino culture, identity and issues; this conference is not limited to delegates of Filipino descent. The facilitators and delegates come from different backgrounds and ethnicities, and the workshops cover a wide array of topics. FACT’s mission is to build a community of leaders by uniting, enlightening and empowering Filipino/Fil-Am/Non-Filipino youth nationwide.
I’ve spoken at the FACT Conference five times, and I am speaking again this coming weekend. It’s one of my favorite conferences to present at. Their cultural night galas after the conference workshops are beautiful, entertaining, educational, and empowering.
Freedom Service Dog of America (FSD). If you love dogs/puppies and are passionate about providing assistance to people experiencing PTSD, physical mobility issues, and/or autism, this is your organization. FSD transforms lives by partnering people with custom-trained assistance dogs. Their clients include veterans with PTSD, children and teens with autism and other neurocognitive disabilities, and individuals with physical challenges resulting from conditions such as cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries, and traumatic brain injury. They also provide professional therapy dogs to serve as partners for clinicians, therapists, law enforcement, and more. Since being founded in 1987, FSD has graduated hundreds of client-dog teams and provided lifetime support to nearly 200 active teams, at no cost to their clients.
I’ve given DEI workshops and coaching sessions to their staff over the years. While I was facilitating the workshops, there were these adorable dogs sitting or lying on the floor and chilling. During my breaks, I could walk down the hallway and play with different puppies. It was so hard leaving that place without stealing at least one puppy.
NAAPIMHA. I have a long history with NAAPIMHA. The mission of the National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association (NAAPIMHA) is to promote the mental health and wellbeing of the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities. NAAPIMHA strives to raise awareness of the role of mental health in an individual’s health and well-being, especially in Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities throughout the country.
I used to run NAAPIMHA’s Friends DO Make a Difference college program, which contributed to my ten-plus years of experience working in higher education and with college students. Friends DO Make a Difference is still going strong and currently focusing on high school students.
NAAPIMHA’s other programs like Achieving Whole Health, Asians*in Focus, and heART’s hope are using creative, artistic, and holistic approaches to address, advocate and normalize mental health conversations within Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Native Hawaiian communities.
The Executive Directors of Color Institute (EDCI) is a two-year leadership development and organizational capacity-building program for BIPOC nonprofit leaders. Monthly peer-led learning sessions strengthen the individual leadership capacity and collective impact of BIPOC-led nonprofit organizations across Metro Denver. The institute seeks participants looking to grow and expand their skill sets, contribute to a dynamic network of peers, and work to inform, shape and maximize opportunities in today’s nonprofit sector while making the sector more inclusive, equitable and just. Click here to see the names of the current participants and their organizations.
I was part of the 2015 EDCI cohort and I learned a great deal from other community leaders. As a presenter to their 2022 cohort, I am extremely humbled and inspired by all of the nonprofit leaders in my workshop groups and the amazing work they are doing to heal and uplift their communities.
Photo by Caley Dimmock on Uplash
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