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.

“It was an absolute honor to watch friendships develop between the adolescents and senior citizens; it would always make me smile when a senior citizen would say, 'My best friend is here,' to a high school student,” said Emily. “I was also humbled to hear cultural stories from all ages. These voices deserve to be heard and learned from.”

One of the student interns, who is from the Nepali-speaking community, was interviewing the Bhutanese-Nepali seniors about their journey from Bhutan to the United States when their stories prompted him to wonder about his own parents’ experiences. He did not know their stories; he only knew that his family had been resettled as refugees from Nepal. Working with seniors inspired him to ask his own parents about their experiences as refugees originally from Bhutan which have been included in the magazine.

The magazine also includes survey answers and artwork from the summer camp students from kindergarten to high school about their favorite aspects of the home cultures of their families which come from the Congolese, Afghan, Columbian, and Nepalese communities among others.