Arts & Culture
Culture & Community-Building
Through Culture & Community-Building, Mekong NYC aims to preserve Southeast Asian culture and language by building local leadership, strengthening intergenerational connections, arts education, and cultural programming.
Group photo of the 2022 Summer Intergenerational Program cohort.
Summer Intergenerational Program
The Summer Intergenerational Program aims to educate youth and adults about the needs and priorities of the community, build their knowledge and skills as leaders in the community, and offer youth and adults opportunities to engage in community organizing, neighborhood revitalization, and social justice efforts. Weekly sessions include group discussions, workshops, and trainings. Youth and adults improve their skills in facilitation, community organizing, public speaking, community outreach, campaign planning, and writing and communication. The program concludes with a community event at the end of August.
INTERESTED IN JOINING? Eligibility:
Be between the ages of 13 to 20 years of age
Preferably of Southeast Asian descent (Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, Mien, Vietnamese)
Preferably lives in the Bronx
Has a willingness to learn about political education, history, arts & culture of Southeast Asia, and leadership development
If interested, please contact our youth coordinators:
Lyly Srey, lyly@mekongnyc.org
Khelvin Srey, khelvin@mekongnyc.org
Youth fellows and guests at our 10th anniversary gala on October 1st, 2022. Photo credit: Vanessa Le
Youth Fellow Program
The Youth Fellows program builds on the knowledge and skills learned from the Summer Intergenerational Program. The program aims to focus on leadership development, and build opportunities to grow as community organizers. Youth fellows engage in more campaigns, base-building work, educational leadership development workshops, civic engagement work and help plan out events. We will be more involved with social media organizing on how to organize campaigns and promoting ourselves through social media. We will also be getting into more depth of the 7th path of SEAFN such as youth empowerment, queer justice, gender justice, anti-imperialism, Black and Asian unity, healing and transformational leadership, and resistance to incarceration and deportation.
Current youth fellows projects:
Storytelling Project
Bronx Wide Platform
Clemency Coalition of New York
Weeks of Action (Textbanking, phonebanking, emailing, etc)
Intergenerational Summer Program
Cultural Events like Tet, Khmer New Year, Mid-Autumn Festival
Monthly Care Packages
Group photo of Mekong NYC staff, youth fellows, and community members at our family day event on August 19th, 2022.
Cultural Events
Mekong NYC hosts a number of cultural events, including:
Tết (Lunar New Year)
Khmer New Year
Tết Trung Thu (Harvest Moon Festival)
Family Day
Dan tranh performers at our 10th anniversary gala on October 1st, 2022. Photo credit: Vanessa Le
Music Workshop and Class
With Yes We Can Music, we host introductory and intermediate music classes to learn to play the đàn tranh/Vietnamese zither.
Current students: http://yeswecanmusic.org/folk.arts/mam/tranh.php
Mekong NYC staff and youth fellows working on the Community Garden.
Community Garden
Our community garden was create to address the lack of access to fresh produce and health disparities of Southeast Asians in the Bronx. The garden provides fresh culturally relevant foods to lower-income Southeast Asian community members. The garden also explores and reclaims Southeast Asian farming/gardening practices, including communal gardening and intergenerational skill-sharing. Lastly, the garden encourages community members to intervene in health injustice as it affects them. For our elder community members, that might mean reconnecting to their culture, exercising through gardening, and developing a connection to the neighborhood and the land that they are working on. For younger folks, it might mean learning how food grows, connecting to the land, and reestablishing ties to fruits and vegetables that are often the core of their identity, as well as gardening practices from their ancestral lands.
Group photo of women’s circle meeting from September 20th, 2019.
Women Circle
In Summer 2012, Mekong NYC launched an 8-week intergenerational program for youth and adults to share their stories through photography, culminating in a exhibit at the Bronx Museum. The women who participated in the program created the Women Circle to continue to create a space for participants to engage in community building and healing, dealing with traumas of the past or current distress, celebrate life, and create new leaders in the community whose political consciousness and contributions to the social justice movement will be at the intersection of healing and organizing. They understand their political identity in the movement for social justice through exploring their community's trauma.