Thank you to Capital One for their support of WILD and financial literacy

InterIm CDA thanks Capital One for their support to our WILD program. We utilized these funds to provide our youth with greater knowledge regarding budgeting, process of financial aid, and creating wealth.  WILD youth explored financial literacy including: how to start a bank account, what does good credit mean, how to avoid financial scams, how to apply for college and scholarships and for student loans. We’re working with youth to put them in the know while they’re in their teens so they can take control of their financial future – and to be leaders in helping others in their families and communities do the same. We thank Capital One for their support of this valuable work.


Photos of the 47th annual pig roast in the Danny Woo Garden in July 2023

Thank you to all who joined us at the annual pig roast last month! And huge thanks to those who provided financial support and donated food and time, including our pig roast sponsor Enterprise Community Partners, our gardeners and community members, Tai Tung, Fort St. George, Uwajimaya,  and Starbucks. And very big thank you to our garden staff, KaeLi Deng and Kathryn Tehl for all their work on the event!

Volunteers picked up food donations from around the CID neighborhood. Photo credit: Huilan Huang.

 

Here are some of the delicious food donations! Photo credit: Huilan Huang.

 

Asian Pacific Islander Coalition Advocating Together for Health (APICAT) volunteered to help set up for the event. Photo credit: Lynette Seigafo.

 

More youth engaged as volunteers with senior gardeners to host the pig roast. Photo credit: Lynette Seigafo.

 

The pig was roasted in the pig roast pit by volunteers who take shifts from Friday evening all night long through Saturday morning turning the pig. Photo credit: InterIm CDA

 

Long time pig roast volunteer Marcus preps the fully roasted pig for the potluck on Saturday. Photo credit: InterIm CDA.

 

People gathered on Friday to enjoy food, games and catching up with one another in the garden. Photo credit: InterIm CDA.

 

On Saturday, gardeners enjoyed a potluck lunch including the roasted pig. Photo credit: InterIm CDA

 


Department of Neighborhoods Food Equity Fund grants InterIm CDA Danny Woo Garden and WILD $100,000

Department of Neighborhoods Food Equity Fund grants InterIm CDA Danny Woo Garden and WILD $100,000

Seattle – The City of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods (DON) has awarded the Danny Woo Garden in Chinatown-International District (CID) and the Wilderness Inner-City Leadership program $100,000 through the Food Equity Fund to support intergenerational learning programs and infrastructure upgrades and repairs that will support community needs in the garden. The Food Equity Fund is a DON program whose purpose is to invest in community-led work that contributes to an equitable and sustainable local food system.

Specifically, this funding will support operations in the Danny Woo Garden in the following ways:

  1. Provide equitable and culturally specific food sources in the Danny Woo Garden for low-income, immigrant, refugee, Asian, and Pacific Islander elders in the CID;
  2. Provide intergenerational information sharing and learning between elders and API youth about food systems, food justice, and food security through the garden to maintain cultural and ethnic food traditions;
  3. Provide funds for infrastructure repairs to maintain sustainable food systems in the garden.

The Danny Woo Garden was created through community activism in 1975 and since then has been a vital source of food security and of maintaining culturally appropriate sources of food for low-income, immigrant, refugee, Asian, and Pacific Islander elders in the CID. Currently, 66 elderly residents utilize close to 100 plots in the 1.5-acre community garden. Over the years, the Danny Woo Garden has fed hundreds of elders. It has also improved their physical and mental health by providing space to be physically and socially active.

Funding will support programs that bring elders and youth together to learn about seed-to-plate practices, culturally specific recipes based on what gardeners have grown, the physical health value of maintaining a healthy diet of ethnic produce, and more. InterIm CDA’s youth program, Wilderness Inner-city Leadership Development (WILD), engages 40-100 low-income API teens ages 14-19 in year-round programming, and the Danny Woo Garden provides a live outdoor classroom for WILD programming that supports two tenets of WILD youth programming: Building intergenerational relationships between API immigrant elders and youth; and learning the value of an organic, culturally relevant garden’s place in a low-income BIPOC community food system. 

Time spent together in the garden among elders and youth creates conversations and experiential information-sharing among generations around concepts of food justice in low-income immigrant and refugee populated communities. Youth gain a holistic understanding of how critical it is for underserved, immigrant communities and individuals to grow what they eat and have access to healthy, organic, culturally relevant, sustainably grown produce.

“Our vision for food equity and sustainability is to honor what our CID community of immigrants and refugees has given up when they’ve left their home countries, usually out of necessity, by giving them space to hold onto their cultural food practices,” said Pradeepta Upadhyay, Executive Director of InterIm CDA. “We also want to ensure this knowledge is passed down to younger generations. We want these culturally unique ties to the land and growing practices to continue here in the CID. This is why we’ve created infrastructure in the garden to support a learning environment for youth.”

Funding will also support much needed infrastructure repairs and ongoing maintenance in the culturally and ethnically responsive garden including for the pig roast pit, chicken coop, one toolshed, the outdoor cookery, maintaining a seed library to offer free seeds to the CID community and garden visitors, cisterns, a boardwalk that allows access to the garden plots, flower beds, and fences and handrails necessary for safety of the elders.

“The garden gave the land back to the old folks who left it in the old country to strike it rich here. They never realized how much they missed the earth,” wrote Bob Santos in his memoir, Humbows Not Hotdogs, about seeing how the creation of the Danny Woo Garden gave back to the elders in the CID and how much they’ve used the garden. This funding helps support this legacy in the CID.

For more information on all awardees, see the DON press release.

Contact: jwasberg@interimcda.org

 


Coalition of CID partners celebrates approval of north and south stations as preferred alternative, reducing risk of community displacement

PRESS RELEASE                                                                              For immediate release
Thursday, March 23, 2023

PRESS CONTACTS:
Christina Shimizu, Executive Director, Puget Sound Sage, 206-552-5508, chrissy@pugetsoundsage.org
Derek Lum, Advocacy and Policy Manager, InterImCDA, dlum@interimcda.org
Nina Wallace, CID Coalition, 360-305-0160, cidnohotel@gmail.com

Coalition of CID partners celebrates approval of north and south stations as preferred alternative, reducing risk of community displacement

WHAT: The Sound Transit board has approved the north and south stations for the West Seattle and Ballard Link Extensions (WSBLE) project that Coalition of CID partners have advocated for.

Chinatown International District, Seattle, King County –

After a long and difficult fight to choose a preferred alternative, the Chinatown International District (CID) Coalition, Puget Sound Sage and InterImCDA are celebrating a major victory for securing the future growth and development of the CID neighborhood to be equitable, affordable, and a sustainable place for immigrants and working class communities of color to live and thrive for generations to come.

The coalition’s fight for a station location is rooted in the vision to maximize opportunity for equitable transit-oriented development, provide great transit options, stop the acceleration of gentrification, and for the survival of a community that has struggled for decades from racist policies and land grabbing encroachment. This decision is a critical step in acknowledging and repairing past harms.

“We extend our sincere appreciation to the Sound Transit board and staff, including Mayor Harrell, Executive Constantine and Council President Juarez for supporting north and south. We want to especially thank Councilmember Tammy Morales, for hearing our voices and concerns and being a vocal advocate against displacement and for inclusive transit oriented development,” said Christina Shimizu, Executive Director of Puget Sound Sage. “We are grateful for their willingness to listen and recognize the importance of our long-standing history and the need for access to regionally connected transit, affordable housing, and opportunities for culturally relevant equitable transit oriented development (eTOD) that do not accelerate gentrification pressures in the neighborhood.”

The CID Coalition, InterIm CDA, and Puget Sound Sage are committed to fighting speculative corporate development and displacement, and to ensuring that communities of color are centered in decision-making around transit and land use. “Good planning means something different for different communities,” Shimizu added. “A truly equitable and inclusive urbanism, and density done right, requires policymakers to listen to communities of color and trust that we know what is best for our neighborhoods.”

“InterIm CDA has been a community based organization serving the needs of the CID for 53 years,” said InterIm CDA Executive Director Pradeepta Upadhyay. “We endorsed the north and south station locations option after weighing the significant impacts on the CID and its property owners, businesses, community organizations, and residents. Based on our values, we believe this is the best option for the community. We thank the Sound Transit board for making the right choice, and look forward to working with the community and Sound Transit to make these options the best they can be for the CID.”

While the CID Coalition, Puget Sound Sage and InterIm CDA are celebrating this victory, they are also aware that their work is not done. The coalition plans to stay engaged and organized to ensure that the community benefits the most from the station: pedestrian improvements for walking and rolling, lighting, and wayfinding among other community benefits and mitigation connected to the light rail line as well as righting past harms. They will also advocate for a platform to connect Sounder to the South of CID station, expanded greenspace and protections for City Hall park, and access to culturally relevant, community based eTOD to provide much-needed affordable housing for the neighborhood.

“This win is only one step to repairing the harm and distrust in our communities, and the destruction that previous infrastructure projects have wrought on the CID,” said Monyee Chau of the CID Coalition. “The copious amount of labor that organizers have put in to protect our neighborhood is a testament to how deeply we all care for this community, and I have so much gratitude for everyone who helped us fight for this win. May we continue to make these conversations more accessible and inclusive of all the people that they affect, and move forward with collaboration and a commitment to ensuring that the Chinatown International District community remains a vibrant and thriving part of Seattle.”

About the CID Coalition:

The Chinatown International District Coalition is a grassroots, multiracial, multiethnic and multigenerational organization that works to promote social, economic, and environmental justice for low-income communities of color in the CID and Greater Seattle. They fight against displacement, gentrification, and the erasure of community history and culture.

About Puget Sound Sage:

Puget Sound Sage charts a path to a living economy in the South Salish Sea and Duwamish River Valley (greater Seattle) regions by developing community power to influence, lead, and govern.  We ground our policies in grassroots organizing & community-based research with people directly impacted by systems of oppression and organizations serving BIPOC workers, their families and communities.  Through the power of grassroots organizing, policy and advocacy strategies, and leveraging the influence of coalitions centering impacted communities, we have organized for and passed some of our region’s most exciting policies that promote climate justice, good jobs and equitable development in low-wage and people of color communities. Our campaigns and theory of change are rooted in intersectional economic & racial justice, which for us means organizing historically disenfranchised people and bringing them together to build power as a vehicle for social change.

About InterIm CDA:

InterIm CDA was created in 1969 and is a nonprofit affordable housing and community development organization based in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District (CID). Since 1969 InterIm CDA (ICDA) provides multilingual, culturally competent housing and community building services to those disenfranchised due to lack of English, low acculturation and poverty. Though historically ICDA’s focus was on the API community living in the CID, they currently serve about 5,000 unduplicated low-income limited English speaking individuals from Asia, Africa and America throughout the greater Puget Sound.

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Seedling giveaway for the community today March 23 at Danny Woo Garden

Hope you can join us today for our community seed giveaway! Spring is here! See you at the Danny Woo Garden today at 1.