40 Years of History at Boston's AACA

After 4 decades, the Asian American Civic Association Still Going Strong, Adjusting to New Community Needs

By Adam Smith, with additional reporting by Yang Yang

Boston - Feb 16, 2007 - Richard Goldberg, who teaches English at the Asian American Civic Association, says his second favorite time of the year is right before Christmas. That’s when he receives cards and mail from former students, most of whom are recent immigrants, telling him how they’re doing, and oftentimes, how they just completed their studies at two-and four-year colleges.

His favorite time of the year, he says, is June, when his former students invite him to their commencement ceremonies.

“I see my students in a cap and gown with a diploma in the commencement line -- it’s rewarding,” said Goldberg, who’s been with the agency for 14 years.
As satisfying as this is for Goldberg, who is also the director of education at the civic association, the men and women who founded the agency in 1967 probably never envisioned the association would become a center for English education for new immigrants.

Over the last 40 years, the Asian American Civic Association, while adapting to the changing times, has completely changed its mission.

When the social services agency was founded, originally as the Chinese American Civic Association, its focus was to support candidates who served the needs of Chinese Americans.

Today, the association steers clear of politics and instead teaches English and vocational skills to immigrants and others, so that they can find jobs or enroll in higher education.

Operating on a budget of just over $1.9 million, the agency's 30-person staff annually serves more than 6,000 clients -- mostly immigrants from China, Haiti, Albania, and Somalia. Its four main services focus on job-skills training and job placement, English-language education, and its multi-service center, which provides assistance with immigration applications, health insurance, filing income-tax returns, translation and interpretation, and other resources. The fourth main service is the Sampan newspaper, which the Asian American Civic Association has published since 1972.

While these services help meet the needs of Greater Boston's growing immigrant population, they are far different from what the agency offered four decades ago.

"The Chinese American Civic Association was started," said founder Neil Chin, "to participate in political support of candidates that would be helpful to the Chinese."

Chin, whom the Sampan interviewed via e-mail, said that even the association's original name, the Chinese American Civic Association, was chosen specifically to "give ourselves some sort of identification to present to the politicians."

At the time, the association operated out of 18 Oxford St., sharing space with the Chinatown American Legion Post. Its first meeting attracted 40 people, Chin recalls.

In many ways, the Chinese American Civic Association was a product of its founders' generation.

The association formed in the late 1960s during a time when social movements were taking over the U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" -- a set of programs aimed at ending poverty and racial discrimination -- was underway, and so was the Civil Rights Movement.

"This was a time when a lot of social-action organizations were being formed all around the country....It was sort of an awakening of the Chinese community in Boston," said Caroline Chang, another founder of the association.

But one milestone in particular had just occurred that would have great impact on the course of Chinese-American history, nationally and locally. The Immigration Act of 1965 was just passed, ending immigration quotas based on national origin.

The 1965 act followed other changes in immigration laws of decades earlier: The U.S. Congress had repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, and the War Brides Act was enacted in 1945. The latter act allowed spouses and children of U.S. military personnel to emigrate to the U.S.

With the opening of immigration policies, the population of Chinese immigrants in Boston was changing, diversifying, and growing. By the late 1960s, Chinese Americans started moving to the suburbs, having kids, and becoming more established in the U.S.

"The community was growing. It was becoming more multilingual. They were not just speaking Toisonese but Cantonese. It was also a community that had more complexity: not just everybody came from a rural village background, but people came from cities, from Hong Kong," said Chang.

"There was an Asian American movement going on in the country, too, that sort of grew out of the black movement. A lot of Asian students were becoming aware of their own identity and then becoming aware of Asian communities in Boston, mostly the Chinese community."

Soon after the Chinese American Civic Association was formed, it also began offering social activities so that Chinese Americans in the suburbs could stay in touch with those living in Chinatown.

As Chinese Americans got married and started having children, "they wanted some way for both their own group to socialize and keep their Chinatown connections and Chinese connections," said Chang.

Soon, the civic association began offering social services, starting with a Chinatown health task force that would later break off and turn into the South Cove Community Health Center. It also started services that later manifested into the Greater Boston Chinese Golden Age Center.

The agency eventually added immigration services and English classes to its programming. In 1972, it began publishing a newsletter, the Sampan, that by the mid-1970s would become a bilingual community newspaper serving all of Chinatown.

Later, the association's clientele began to diversify, thus the change in name to the Asian American Civic Association.

Chau-ming Lee, the director of the association for the past 25 years, said that when he first came to the agency in 1982, there were only three main services offered: adult basic education that taught English to immigrants, the multi-service center, and the Sampan.

"The first thing in my mind, at that time, was: 'Not how we can expand, but how can we make this a better program?'" he recalled.

By the mid-1980s, he said, the agency began looking to expand its services.

"The community kept changing as far as its needs," said Lee.

Soon after, he said, the association began exploring how it could provide an office-skills training program, which would shape the direction of the organization for years to come. The office-skills course today remains one of the association's oldest, vocational-skills-training program.

Now the agency, which will move into a newly-built building at 87 Tyler St. later this summer with another Chinatown group, is focusing on further developing its workforce-training programs, while at the same time completing fundraising to pay for its share of the new six-story building.

Expanding its workforce-development programs coincides with the growth of Massachusetts' immigration population, which has exploded over the last 20 years. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2005 nearly one in seven Massachusetts residents were immigrants.

Yet the state's minority and immigrant populations still struggle, according to a recent study from the Institute for Asian American Studies at UMass Boston. The study, entitled "Far From the Commonwealth," found that nearly a third of Asian Americans in Massachusetts earn low incomes, as do more than half of Hispanics and four in 10 African Americans.

In recent years, the Asian American Civic Association's job training has centered on offering various programs. One of them, called "Facilities Maintenance," teaches the basics of carpentry, plumbing, and math to aspiring maintenance workers. The previously-mentioned Office Skills Training program teaches basic computer and accounting skills to immigrants who want to obtain office jobs.

In January of 2005, the AACA expanded its job-training programs to create a program in automotive-technician training. The program is a partnership with two other Boston nonprofits, La Alianza Hispana and the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, as well as with several automotive-business groups.

Last year, the AACA also created a course, the Boston Self-Sufficiency Project, that helps immigrants learn how to create resumes, gain confidence in interviewing, and apply for work.

Now the organization is exploring the possibility of forming a self-sufficient business that could train students to make money to support other programs at that agency.

Over the coming years, said the agency's deputy director, Sunny Schwartz, the goal is to "become the premier workforce development agency -- to be on the cutting edge of offering job training and English" education.