It has been a while since I wrote and much has happened in that time, personally, and within the community. Six months into 2021, I think this is a good time to review and look back at what I’ve done and yet to be done.
At first, glance, if you are my new subscriber, you might mistake this for stock or investing blog with my Reader’s Goodies and Stock Alert section. But you are forgiven for thinking so! This blog is a journal for my personal journey and a place to share my passion along the way with others whose passion might intersect. My earliest and a lifelong passion is gardening. You can check one of my early posts on gardening here or check out these tags on the page #GardenDharma #Planting
Over the years, that passion has developed into different things, one was a written proposal to my city’s participatory budget program that you can read here, entitled Food Forest For Greensboro, An Idealist’s Fantasy. Even though I did not get the result I had hoped for, I never gave up on the dream of creating food forests in Greensboro, I’ve only scaled down. This scaled-down version is my current NFT Garden, where I am working on transforming my garden into the model I want to see in my neighborhood where friends and neighbors would grow and share the harvest with each other inspired by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger.
This Garden 2.0 version is about 60 percent complete, I will post another update once I set up the irrigation system and trellis. This is the project I am most excited about.
My personal passion for gardening, food security, and farming also play out in my community work. I’ve been with the Cambodian Cultural Center of North Carolina for 4 years as their Grants Program Director, starting in 2017. I’ve written a few grant proposals aligning with the same theme regarding food desert, hunger, and food access in low-income and immigrant/refugee neighborhoods. While not always successful, that journey has led me to meet many wonderful people working towards similar goals, as well as different organizations. Last year, we received a $12,500 grant from the United Way of Greater Greensboro to assist our community during the COVID-19 lockdown, which allowed us to procure culturally appropriate food items for over 80 families in the Cambodian community in addition to assisting with some utility and emergency expenses.
In collaboration with three other community non-profits, this year in 2021, we became the co-partners of the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust grant to take on COVID-19 Response through several proposed community capacity building projects. One of the proposed projects from CCC of NC is our Sustainable Community Farm which would allow us to build upon the land that our temple already has that CCC of NC has access to. The program will allow us to work with experts in agriculture to assess our land and current local farming practices of our Cambodian community and to incorporate the knowledge of North Carolina’s agriculture experts into our community – a knowledge sharing to increase productivity or yield. Also included in the plan is how to go from our community-based vending to connecting or delivering these fresh organic vegetables to the market.
A workshop on how to make the most use of North Carolina’s season and soil is something many elders in our communities expressed interests in. So this is quite an exciting project to work on, personally for me as well.
CCC of NC also has reached its first milestone since its birth in 2012. Through the KBR grant and the Southeast Asian Coalition grant for community civic engagement, we are now able to hire 2 part-time assistant managers, and 1 intern. It is a great sigh of relief and a validation of the importance of our work, to be entrusted with these funds so that we can focus on growing our organizational capacity, instead of surviving. If you’ve followed our organization, you know it has been run all by non-paying volunteers and Board members. Our board members and active members contribute $20 per month just in order to sustain it, so the grants are certainly a welcome breath of relief for us.
Through the KBR Grant partnership with CCC of NC, MDA, and Nepalese community of High Point, I’ve been hired as the Project Coordinator for the three organizations, this also means, for the first time in my non-profit work, I’m going to get paid! Roughly $5,000 or so. But I’ve worked with CCC on volunteer hour so long now, seeing how much our community need the resources, I decided to donate all my compensation to CCC of NC instead.
I am excited to continue work on these new projects for CCC of NC as well as our inter-organization joint projects. Looking forward to seeing amazing things that the younger generations that we hired this year are going to accomplish. The vision of our Board, which I so heartily agree with, is CCC is always about the future of our next generation. Building out our capacity means giving young people a chance to step in, to learn, and to lead!
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