Danbury News Times
By HILARY RUSS Associated Press Writer
03/14/2009
PROVIDENCE, R.I.—Sophea Pheap felt ignored, alone and always one step behind in her old GED class.
She thought the teachers went too fast without making the difficult material any fun. And the 26-year-old daughter of Cambodian refugees said she just never fit in with the other students.
Then Pheap found the Providence Youth Student Movement, where Southeast Asian-American teenagers and young adults get paid $100 a month to attend classes every weekday for two hours.
"Here, I'm not shy," said Pheap who wants a better job than the one she used to have at a sandwich shop. "I'm a single mom, and that's what I need. A GED."
The state's fiscal crisis and national recession have stretched social service and noprofit groups thin, with a double-digit unemployment rate that has pushed already stressed families closer to the financial brink. But this group is helping give struggling Southeast Asian youngsters—whose families are often from war-torn countries—education, job skills and tools for staying off the streets. Some supporters say it's the one place they feel safe and welcome.
But the weakening economy is taking its toll on the group's funding.
Kids who participate in the group's leadership and community organizing program get a stipend of up to $400 a month. But those stipends, as well as money others get for taking GED classes, are getting cut by 10 percent because the recession has stretched resources thin. Staff salaries
and the overall budget will also shrink, said executive director Kohei Ishihara.
The cuts leave the group's new headquarters, where they moved in December, unfinished for now. While they have chairs, couches, tables and computers, they still need lighting, additional construction and other furnishings—small items that add up, Ishihara said.
"What's difficult right now is the anxiety of not knowing what's going to happen in the future," he said, adding that they've been getting letters from funders who are reducing and suspending grants because foundations' portfolios have taken such a hit in the stock market.
"A lot of kids who normally hang out in different places, they come to hang out in (the group) where they have self-comfort and they have each other," said Molly Soum, a counselor at The Genesis Center, which helps Southeast Asian refugees in the city.
Some members are young men affiliated in varying degrees with different gangs. But here, they get along, Pheap and others said.
The group's agenda is diverse. Operating out of a converted warehouse in Providence, it offers GED classes, a youth leadership and community organizing program, and a support group for gay and lesbian teenagers.
The group was founded in 2001 after several Cambodian-gang related clashes and killings in the city. Makna Men, chair of the mayor's Southeast Asian Advisory Council, called the younger generation "the missing link" to solving a host of problems in the community.
In the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled Southeast Asia to escape the violent Khmer Rouge regime and civil unrest. U.S. Census Bureau estimates from 2007 show about 11,000 people of mainland Southeast Asian descent living in Rhode Island. Advocates say the number is closer to 20,000.
Many struggled to adapt and couldn't relate to their increasingly Americanized children, who sometimes found themselves the targets of discrimination.
Ishihara and Sarath Suong, the program's founders, were roommates and students at Brown University in 2001.
Ishihara, 29, grew up in suburban Washington, D.C. as the son of a Japanese father and white mother. His mixed heritage made him feel isolated when classmates and teachers at his Episcopal high school couldn't figure out whether to think of him as white or Asian.
He disclosed he was gay when no one else at his school had come out.
Suong, of Revere, Mass., who has 10 brothers and sisters, was born in a Thai refugee camp after his parents fled Cambodia. He's the only sibling to go to college, though he had to drop out in part because of financial difficulties.
"My brothers and sisters should be able to get an education, should be able to hold police accountable, should be able to communicate with their elders, should be able to think there was a better way to treat each other," Suong said.
At first, the group tried to fight the deportations of several Cambodians, including some "original gangsters" in Providence, back to a country they barely knew.
"We created something too big to manage," Ishihara said of that campaign. "It was all idealism and all passion, and very little practicality."
Organizers decided to get serious, and the group became a nonprofit in 2004. They're urging schools to translate codes of conduct and put out guides that will help parents understand how to read report cards.
And they've criticized Gov. Don Carcieri for cutting interpreters from the Department of Human Resources staff. One group member called that decision "racist," prompting Carcieri's wife last year to compare the teenagers to suicide bombers and their mentors at the group to terrorist leaders.
The group demanded, but never got, an apology.
At a recent meeting, the two-dozen attendees were as diverse as the group's mission.
Some older, unsmiling men sat on a worn couch. One, arms crossed, never removed his sunglasses.
But there were also squeaky-voiced girls, teenage boys, parents and the adults who run the group's programs. Six members described their goals for community organizing.
Pheap, whose daughter, brother and nephew were also there, said she wanted to pursue a career in the fashion industry.
"They really want this," she said of her fellow group members and classmates. "They really want to change their lives."
03/14/2009
PROVIDENCE, R.I.—Sophea Pheap felt ignored, alone and always one step behind in her old GED class.
She thought the teachers went too fast without making the difficult material any fun. And the 26-year-old daughter of Cambodian refugees said she just never fit in with the other students.
Then Pheap found the Providence Youth Student Movement, where Southeast Asian-American teenagers and young adults get paid $100 a month to attend classes every weekday for two hours.
"Here, I'm not shy," said Pheap who wants a better job than the one she used to have at a sandwich shop. "I'm a single mom, and that's what I need. A GED."
The state's fiscal crisis and national recession have stretched social service and noprofit groups thin, with a double-digit unemployment rate that has pushed already stressed families closer to the financial brink. But this group is helping give struggling Southeast Asian youngsters—whose families are often from war-torn countries—education, job skills and tools for staying off the streets. Some supporters say it's the one place they feel safe and welcome.
But the weakening economy is taking its toll on the group's funding.
Kids who participate in the group's leadership and community organizing program get a stipend of up to $400 a month. But those stipends, as well as money others get for taking GED classes, are getting cut by 10 percent because the recession has stretched resources thin. Staff salaries
and the overall budget will also shrink, said executive director Kohei Ishihara.
The cuts leave the group's new headquarters, where they moved in December, unfinished for now. While they have chairs, couches, tables and computers, they still need lighting, additional construction and other furnishings—small items that add up, Ishihara said.
"What's difficult right now is the anxiety of not knowing what's going to happen in the future," he said, adding that they've been getting letters from funders who are reducing and suspending grants because foundations' portfolios have taken such a hit in the stock market.
"A lot of kids who normally hang out in different places, they come to hang out in (the group) where they have self-comfort and they have each other," said Molly Soum, a counselor at The Genesis Center, which helps Southeast Asian refugees in the city.
Some members are young men affiliated in varying degrees with different gangs. But here, they get along, Pheap and others said.
The group's agenda is diverse. Operating out of a converted warehouse in Providence, it offers GED classes, a youth leadership and community organizing program, and a support group for gay and lesbian teenagers.
The group was founded in 2001 after several Cambodian-gang related clashes and killings in the city. Makna Men, chair of the mayor's Southeast Asian Advisory Council, called the younger generation "the missing link" to solving a host of problems in the community.
In the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled Southeast Asia to escape the violent Khmer Rouge regime and civil unrest. U.S. Census Bureau estimates from 2007 show about 11,000 people of mainland Southeast Asian descent living in Rhode Island. Advocates say the number is closer to 20,000.
Many struggled to adapt and couldn't relate to their increasingly Americanized children, who sometimes found themselves the targets of discrimination.
Ishihara and Sarath Suong, the program's founders, were roommates and students at Brown University in 2001.
Ishihara, 29, grew up in suburban Washington, D.C. as the son of a Japanese father and white mother. His mixed heritage made him feel isolated when classmates and teachers at his Episcopal high school couldn't figure out whether to think of him as white or Asian.
He disclosed he was gay when no one else at his school had come out.
Suong, of Revere, Mass., who has 10 brothers and sisters, was born in a Thai refugee camp after his parents fled Cambodia. He's the only sibling to go to college, though he had to drop out in part because of financial difficulties.
"My brothers and sisters should be able to get an education, should be able to hold police accountable, should be able to communicate with their elders, should be able to think there was a better way to treat each other," Suong said.
At first, the group tried to fight the deportations of several Cambodians, including some "original gangsters" in Providence, back to a country they barely knew.
"We created something too big to manage," Ishihara said of that campaign. "It was all idealism and all passion, and very little practicality."
Organizers decided to get serious, and the group became a nonprofit in 2004. They're urging schools to translate codes of conduct and put out guides that will help parents understand how to read report cards.
And they've criticized Gov. Don Carcieri for cutting interpreters from the Department of Human Resources staff. One group member called that decision "racist," prompting Carcieri's wife last year to compare the teenagers to suicide bombers and their mentors at the group to terrorist leaders.
The group demanded, but never got, an apology.
At a recent meeting, the two-dozen attendees were as diverse as the group's mission.
Some older, unsmiling men sat on a worn couch. One, arms crossed, never removed his sunglasses.
But there were also squeaky-voiced girls, teenage boys, parents and the adults who run the group's programs. Six members described their goals for community organizing.
Pheap, whose daughter, brother and nephew were also there, said she wanted to pursue a career in the fashion industry.
"They really want this," she said of her fellow group members and classmates. "They really want to change their lives."
1 comment:
Thank you for posting about our organization and spreading news of the Southeast Asian community in RI. Here is a link to our webpage PrYSM
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