Fall of 2023
Carina became a leader of Harvard-Westlake Middle School’s Asian American affinity group, Asian American Culture Club (AACC), in her freshman year of high school. Representing the school’s Asian American community, Carina took part in many initiatives.
In April of 2024, I attended the annual AsEA Asian Educators Alliance Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, alongside other AACC leaders. This three day conference allowed me to meet Asian Americans from other states of the US as well as Canada. We talked about issues within our communities and ended the conference with a presentation that dives deeper into a specific issue we wanted to present to other American American educators. In front of hundreds of adults, we spoke about increasing Asian American literature in English classrooms.
This initiative resonated with my entire group, and we decided to bring this goal back to our very own English classrooms. Following the conference, all AACC leaders joined our school’s English department meeting and advocated for the addition of Asian American-related books into our English curriculum. The following school year, an English teacher reached out to us and selected her teacher’s choice book to be Under a Painted Sky by Stacey Lee in light of our presentation.
After the Taiwan Earthquake hit in 2024, our group reacted fast to this unprecedented disaster. We initiated a boba fundraiser at school, where all proceeds will go to Tzu Chi, a non-profit based in Taiwan that has been crucial to recovery efforts. In collaboration with Sunright Tea Studio, we received over 100 boba orders and raised over $500.