AKRON, OH, August 20, 2024 - Asian Services in Action (ASIA) and Jin Huo Community (JHC) are proud to announce the inaugural issue of Asian Services in Action Co-Generational Magazine. a co-generational magazine from the refugee and immigrant communities of Summit County. Its contents range from anecdotes of the community elders’ experiences in refugee camps to artistic renditions of the seniors’ stories drawn by students from ASIA’s youth program, the International Community Empowerment Project (ICEP). The magazine is set to be publicly available by September 27th.

Emily Grad, the program specialist of ASIA’s Children, Family, and Youth (CYF) department, came up with the idea of high school students interviewing elders to compile the co-generational magazine in the beginning of the summer. She learned about the memory scrapbooks that the seniors were creating as part of programming in JHC, ASIA’s affiliated adult daycare and senior center. She was curious to learn more about the seniors’ stories behind the photos and reached out to May Chen, board president of JHC, and Alice Zhang, the program manager of JHC. They proposed bringing CYF’s student interns into the senior center to interview the elders. JHC and the KC Juan Fund sponsored the project and connected the students to the seniors.

"ASIA’s first co-generational effort is to have youth give voice and visibility to our immigrant and elders experiencing cultural and language barriers,” said May.

While the seniors worked on their memory books, five student interns visited the senior center once a week. They helped seniors with scrapbooking and asked them about their life stories. The seniors shared about their childhoods, immigration to or resettlement in the United States, and the growth of their families. The students would reconvene to scribe the stories and review their findings. They ultimately collected twenty-eight life stories, including the stories of some of the student interns’ own families who are members of local refugee and immigrant communities.