Organization Mission/Vision Students for the Preservation of Chinatown (SPOC) came to life in the wake of the organizers who laid the foundations of community investment and activism in Chinatown. The generations before us had not only fought and won against previous attempts of predatory development from the Vine Street Expressway to the Phillies Stadium and Foxwoods Casino, but they had stayed and built the institutions in Chinatown in place of where these developments would have been. These community centered and led institutions, including the Folks-Arts Cultural Treasures School and Asian Arts Initiative, continue to nourish generations of young advocates like SPOC that had the support, relationships, and knowledge to continue the legacy of community activism.

While student mobilization and opposing the arena are important, we believed that it was our role models and Chinatown institutions who encouraged and instilled trust in our capabilities and agency as young people. In a city where youth face the burden of school budget cuts, are increasingly policed, and neglected, we offer an alternative vision through Ginger Arts’ investment and empowerment of young people. Youth in Philadelphia have increasingly fewer spaces to gather and to be in community. With the decrease of public funding to spaces such as our schools, libraries, recreation and community centers, we as youth are expressing our demands to cultivate these third spaces by us and for us. While the Ginger Arts Center seeks to amplify AAPI histories and identities, we hope to cultivate a space that can be inclusive of all young people, and the diverse and intersectional identities they embody.

We are deeply committed to working in solidarity with grassroot community organizations and groups that serve historically marginalized communities across our city. Located in the heart of our city, Chinatown is cherished as a cultural treasure and a predominantly working class, immigrant neighborhood that brings together people of all racial, ethnic, linguistic, and generational backgrounds. For Ginger Arts Center, it is a priority and ongoing goal to build stronger relationships with community organizations that work with youth across the city. For example, we have cultivated partnerships with youth leaders in the People’s Townhomes, JUNTOS and VietLead, who work with Black, Latinx and Southeast Asian communities respectively. Through shared participation and support of each other’s work and future collaborative projects or events, we hope to cultivate youth power that spans across communities.

As an organization, SPOC formed in response to the proposed arena in Chinatown, and always seeks to work in alignment with the greater Save Chinatown Coalition. Similarly, one of the Ginger Arts Center’s main goals is to be responsive to the needs of our community and the youth who come through our space. Ginger Arts aims to cultivate a collaborative, inclusive space where young people can come to be in community, learn alongside each other, make art, and dream. Our goal is to equip another generation of young people with the history, mentorship, and confidence to feel empowered to advocate for their community. Ginger Arts will host free programming on community organizing, art, oral history, and cultural preservation. As a collective, we deeply value intergenerational learning, and we hope to always center our own elders and activists as we learn how to collectively build youth power. This type of intergenerational learning centers a horizontal approach to working alongside each other, where we hope youth who come to Ginger Arts Center can be invited to participate and lead in ways that resonate with them.

In the upcoming year, we hope to have regular programming throughout the year that will include film screenings and conversations, community-engaged teach-ins, art workshops, and an ongoing oral histories project. Each month, we seek to partner with a different organization and group to intentionally amplify their work. As an example, when we partner with Viet Lead, we hope to screen their wonderful docu-series, “Taking Root”, and lead teach-ins that focus on issues related to immigration rights, documentation status, and deportation countless members of the Southeast Asian community and members of the immigrant diaspora face broadly.