Thank you Letter from Hsiu-Lan Chang to Attendees, Volunteers and Committee Members of the Inaugural AAPI Community Welcome at Brookline High School
115 Greenough Street, held on Wednesday, August 25th, 2021 from 5pm - 7pm
Dear Attendees, Volunteers and Committee Members of the Inaugural AAPI Community Welcome at Brookline High School,
By working together, our August 25th IACW event achieved more than we set out to do. What a Community! And what a way to launch the brand new BHS STEM Building! We were thrilled to welcome over 300 attendees - AAPI students, parents, BHS educators and staff, student and parent volunteers, community supporters and PSB leaders.
IACW co-creators of BHS, APAC, SASA and BAAFN hope that this first-ever Open House will be a foundation for future, annual "AAPI Community Welcomes". So many people contributed to the success of this event. Student artist Sophie O'Connell who designed our poster with her team of Mandarin Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese and Hindi translators. Student Musician Jia-Yi and her awesome musical family who provided live music. Kelli McDermott who personally ran out to the supermarket at 4:45pm on 8/25 to get the bottles of water that went MIA. Jimmy Mellett and all the custodians for making the STEM Building ready and sparkling. Our BHS teachers, nurses, guidance counselors, social workers who stand ready to support our students. Mr. Priestly at the Copy Shop who printed our student and parent handouts. And last but not least Dean Poon, Mr. Meyer and Our Fantastic Army of Student + Parent Volunteers and our Simply Amazing APAC and SASA Student Leaders - Lilia Burtonpatel, Yuki Hoshi, Lily Lockwood, Gia Katwa, Rohan Chopra and Keya Waikar.
Two days before the event, Congressman Auchincloss, District Director Dana Hanson and District Representative John Cruz informed us that they would like to attend our event. We were honored that they stayed with us for over an hour and listened with interest to the speeches and visited our language, resources and food tables.
Thank you for joining us Superintendent Guillory, Deputy Superintendent Casey Ngo-Millier, School Committee Member Susan Wolff-Diktoff, Brookline Community Foundation Executive Director Giselle Ferro Puigbo and many other friends of the Brookline AAPI community.
All of us at BAAFN are heartened by the solidarity of our AAPI community! Please enjoy some of our event photos below and feel free to share with us the ones that you took, too:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mAm5ehgTpiA4JmeGUaxk2VJz-mK9g7PW?usp=sharing
Gratefully,
Hsiu-Lan Chang
On behalf of the BAAFN Steering Committee
