April 2023

When life gives you lemons don’t make lemonade, make pink lemonade. Be unique.

-Wanda Sykes

What is it like to work fulltime, teach on the side, run a nonprofit, and care for a parent with dementia and rage issues? It is not something I would recommend for the weak of heart or anyone with any real sense.  I took on too much this year without really knowing what it means to say yes to more money and more responsibilities. Why I am sharing this – to let you know that we make choices every day based on our priorities and the consequences from these choices might have significant impact.

On account of my decision to say yes this year, I was unable to really focus on marketing the adult program, Embodied Presence, and consequently, we just didn’t have the enrollment.  So we had to cancel it. When I have some time in the summer, I will need to sit down and determine how to market a program that demands much time and focus from its participants. I have no answer at this moment, but luckily, we were able to salvage the program for the young facilitators for Activism@Work.  Now it is a facilitators’ training program.  This will be a great space to explore my next writing project on the art of facilitating.

Now, I come to our current program, the summer youth workshop, Activism@Work. Because of our failure in marketing the adult program, we are intentionally forming partnerships to grow our network. We want to make sure that our first in-person youth gathering has the numbers to warrant running the program. We have a lot riding on the success of this program. So far, we have two organizations partnering with us, COLOR and Soul 2 Soul Sisters. We are excited about these partnerships, but we are pursuing a couple more potential partnerships and hopefully this endeavor will be rewarded.

Without question, we were disappointed about our adult program, but we are re-channeling the energy to ensure the success of the youth program. Our facilitators will be trained for 8 weeks and we will focus the next few weeks to marketing the event. And to make this possible, we need the support of our Platform community.

 Sam Joo

CEO and Founder

April 4, 2023