A Hello from our Springterns!

Dear Community,

This is Nancy and Christine. We were ~winterns~ from Brown University and we worked on the Dragon Fruit Project for two weeks this past winter break, specifically writing short-form narratives for some of the people who were interviewed in preparation for the Dragon Fruit Digital Portal launch. Even though we worked with APIENC for only two weeks, we received valuable mini trainings on many things, from conflict resolution to radical welcome to leadership development. Since we both live in San Francisco, having something meaningful to do while visiting our city made our winter breaks much more worthwhile. We had such a good time, that we decided to stay on as APIENC’s newest ~springterns~. Hear a little bit about our experience below:

“I met the core volunteers at their retreat and learned more about the different facets of APIENC’s work and their goals for the upcoming year. Working with APIENC not only deepened my connections to the API community in San Francisco/Bay Area, but it also allowed me to develop my capacity as an API leader. I learned about myself, and I learned that when working, it is also important to make time for laugh and play.”  – Nancy Truong

“This winter break, I interned for API Equality – Northern California (APIENC), located in San Francisco’s Chinatown, working primarily on the Dragon Fruit Project, an intergenerational oral history project that explores queer Asian Pacific Islanders and their experiences with love and activism in the 1960s through the 1990s. I cannot thank the people who helped make this happen enough, for opening up a whole other world for me, of people and the work they do in my own city that I did not even know existed. While working on the Dragon Fruit Project, I read hundreds of pages of transcripts of incredible stories told by the very people who helped us get to where we are today, stories that I would have never come across. Working on this project made me realize and understand the importance of the work I was contributing to, not only for the organization and community, but also for myself. Because no one else is going to do it, we are writing our history ourselves.” – Christine Lim