Glide like a dragon, thrive like a forest. Happy new year—may all your loved ones be deeply nourished! This lunar new year, we welcome the wood dragon and its offerings of creativity, exuberance, triumph, and wit.

We include a digital 門聯 (mùhn lyùhn) to hang on doors and walls as words of blessing. This year, it reads, 欣欣向龍 (translation: to thrive and flourish). Print it out and hang it to receive the good luck and prosperity of the dragon to your home for the new lunar year. When you do, tag us @huafoundation to show us where you’ve hung yours!

The Lunar New Year begins on February 10, 2024. This year, we’ve partnered with local comic artist @geno.shu, and Chau Luen Athletics to welcome the Year of the Dragon, through a dragon dance themed design. In Chinese mythology, dragons are the spirits that rule over water and weather. Traditionally, dragon dances were performed as a way to pray for rain, to ensure a strong harvest. Because the dragon puppet is so long, a whole community must come together to bring the dragon to life, to guide us towards our collective success. 

Like the dragon swirls to the many tributaries of its ocean, we have been tending to the programs that serve our communities over the past year. 

In March 2023, under the Language Access Project, we launched Language in Practice: A toolkit for equitable communications, and in the following months we convened several virtual webinars and in-person workshops with local communications and engagement practitioners, as well as community-serving organizations to better understand how we can collaborate towards greater language accessibility in the region. In May 2023, alongside the C19 Response Coalition, our ongoing work in language accessibility was recognized by the University of British Columbia’s Public Humanities Hub through their Public Engagement Award. 

In August 2023, in partnership with Be You Counselling, we welcomed a new cohort to our Reorienting Our Trauma program in Vancouver’s Chinatown. In this program, Asian youth collectively explore themes of cultural reclamation, intergenerational and racialized trauma, diasporic angst and more, in an approach that embraces healing as a collective, by helping individuals make sense of their trauma by sharing, listening, and learning about things together. This time around, we are collating our reflections in the form of a workbook to allow those who did not participate in this program access to materials, exercises, and further resources provided to this cohort. It will be available in May to commemorate both Asian Heritage Month and Mental Health Awareness Month. 

Starting September 2023, led by Chinatown community organizations hua foundation, Chinatown Today, and Yarrow Society, we began working on a project in partnership with SFU’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue and the BC Law Institute called Renovate the Public Hearing. In an effort to make civic public hearings more equitable, we held workshops and targeted interviews to listen, discuss, and learn about Chinese diasporic community experiences at public hearings. Cataloging these experiences, including lessons learned from events like 105 Keefer, allow the community, decision makers, and those holding them accountable to reflect upon decades of organizing for equity for their communities in policy and civic processes. A final report that uses those experiences to propose legal reforms for implementing changes to public hearings at both a provincial and municipal level will be available to the public in 2025. 

In the Fall 2023 academic term, in partnership with Dr. JP Catungal and UBC’s Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) Program, we co-developed and co-led a brand new course: ACAM320J Asian Canadian Community Organizing. Through this research studio, undergraduate students had the opportunity to learn from and with local organizations and community activists, asking important questions around how we can facilitate meaningful research that is grounded in and accountable to community. ACAM320J will run again this Fall; keep an eye out for more details and be sure to spread the word!

And finally, we continue to invest time and care into our community development and capacity building portfolio. We work directly with BIPOC youth to help them launch their community based projects and develop skills on running an organization, all while providing administrative and accounting support for their initiatives, including sponsoring their grant applications. This provides us the opportunity to support a wide range of initiatives that we believe in and want to see thrive in our communities. Stay tuned for updates as we expand this portfolio even further in 2024.

Looking back at this year, we feel proud of the creative, slow, and innovative ways our small team has worked to increase language accessibility, expand people’s knowledge of racialized trauma, catalogue formative experiences to enact real systemic change, facilitate community conversations in new environments, and continue to help BIPOC youth thrive. 

If you believe in our work, any kind of donation can help us do it with more fortitude and vigor. Please consider starting a monthly donation or make a one-time contribution. Monthly donations not only make it possible for us to keep existing programs running, but also to dream bigger and imagine brighter, more sustainable futures for our work. A special thank you to those who already support our work financially and beyond—it means a lot to us to be in such a generous community.

Thank you 感謝, and Happy Lunar New Year! 恭喜發財! 🐉✨

With care,

Christina Lee 李嘉明, Kevin Huang 黃儀軒, and Kimberley Wong 黄壯慈; with

A. Mylvaganam 麦英, Arina Sin, Betty Yeung 楊家琪, Claire Louise Okatch, Elaina Hằng Nguyễn, Guneet Pooni, Jessamyn Hung 洪子晴, JP Catungal, Kailey Tam 譚慧儀, Kathleen Anne Ravalo Zaragosa, Kayley Hirose, Mimi Nguyễn

And Crecien Bencio, Jessica Wang 王衍華, Joanne Li 李亚君, Joyce Liao 廖釆約, and Yara Younis يارا يونس from the board