Newsletter: June 2023- June 2024
Written by: Maanya Patil
Throughout the course of the year, we have been involved in several events both in school and within the community. To keep in touch with the goal of our DAY chapter here in Chesterfield, to promote diversity and empower Asian youth in our area, we’ve started by making monthly posts on Instagram discussing a wide range of topics relating to Asia and Asian culture. For instance, during Asian American and Pacific Islander Month we collaborated on a post which focused on Asian American and Pacific Islander figures who have positively contributed to our world today. In other posts, we’ve focused on different traditions and festivals that are celebrated across diverse cultures in Asia as more universal topics such as climate change and natural disasters that have occurred in the continent.
Aside from our informative social media posts, we’ve made efforts to get involved in our community. In Chesterfield, we’ve actively participated in the Harvest Festival, during the fall, and the Green Fair, during the spring. In these events, we set up our own stands and sold handmade items (including jewelry and knit animals), stickers, and food items. We also had members of DAY do henna tattoos as that is always popular in our community. Specifically during the Green Fair, we created pamphlets which detailed the environmental issues in the US as well as in Asia, keeping with the “living greener” theme of the event. The funds that we gathered from these events were donated to various relief funds including Peacewindsamerica, which was to help the recovery from the earthquake in Taiwan, and a relief fund for an earthquake that had hit Afghanistan.
Seeing as all of our current members of DAY belong to the same high school, we also participated in some school functions. For instance, our school holds an annual Multicultural Day where students are able to pick a country to represent and show off its culture, fostering a diverse environment. After sending multiple proposals, we were able to represent Bangladesh in 2023 and Nepal in 2024. Each year, we gathered together and made a trifold board which included information about the country including notable dates and influential figures, and also added some decorations such as banners and flowers to decorate the table. Some members also volunteered to make and bring food, specific to the country we were representing, to give out to the student body. We were able to dress up either in the country’s traditional attire or the flag colors when standing around our table.
Another that we have participated in this year include creating postcards for the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) organization, where each member created 2-3 personalized postcards to be delivered to the children of refugees to show our love and support to refugees around the world.
More recently, we have collaborated with AyuMedics, an organization that is focused on healthcare and medicine, to create a social media post which discusses traditional South Asian medical practices and remedies that are used today in healthcare.
Over the course of the past year, we have made efforts to increase involvement within our community and find ways to give back to our society. In the future of DAY Chesterfield, we hope to continue our participation in these events and expand our avenues to have an increasing impact on proper Asian representation to sustain a diverse and inclusive society.