Chinatown Beautification Day and Youth Conference

The 10th Annual Chinatown Beautification Day (CBD) and our youth conference is a weekend for high school students to explore leadership and community. Through a full day of workshops around leadership, community involvement, environmental awareness and more, high school students are encouraged to get involved with their own communities and given the tools necessary to create change. The conference is followed by a clean-up of Chinatown, where over 200 volunteers come out to physically clean up the streets as well as show the community how much they care.

History

Chinatown Beautification Day began as a project created by CYI’s 2003 Summer Leadership Institute. The original mission was to address concerns that Manhattan’s Lower East Side had become neglected in the aftermath of 9/11. Since 2003, CYI has held CBD annually, consistently gathering between 150 and 350 high school youth to clean the streets of Chinatown. In 2009, CBD was expanded to include the citywide High School Youth Conference, which preceded CBD in the same weekend. At the conference, youth attend workshops on a variety of issues, including mental health, women’s empowerment, hip hop as a tool for social justice, environmental justice, and cultural identity.

Our goals for the 2012 Chinatown Beautification Weekend include:

• To raise awareness on topics in environmentalism, sustainability, hate crimes, Asian-American politics, voter registration, and more.
• To empower youth to explore the Lower East Side/Chinatown community and contribute to it.
• To inspire all participants and people to learn skills to take action and be a leader in their community
• To register voters in the LES/Chinatown for the upcoming election year as well as raise awareness about voting rights

The Team

Jensen Cheong, Events Coordinator
Jensen is a rising sophomore at Cornell University, majoring in Urban and Regional Studies with an Asian American Studies minor. This will be his fifth year participating in CBD and second year as a coordinator. He also participated in the Hate Crimes Prevention Project for three years and was a participant in SLI 2010. He is excited for another productive and empowering CBD weekend!

Betty Fong, Public Relations Coordinator
Betty is a rising senior at Hunter College High School. She has been involved in CYI as a volunteer in CLP '10-'11 as well as a participant in SLI '11 and group leader in CBD '11. She looks forward to a sunshine, rainbows, and challenge-filled summer coordinating CBD and reaching out to more community members!

Wendy Ye, Treasurer
Wendy is a rising senior at St. Edmund Preparatory High School. This is her first being involved in the CBD event and with CYI. She is extremely excited to be a part of the CBD team this year and anticipates the future memories made with CYI in the road ahead.

Joan Wang, Workshops Coordinator
Joan is a rising freshman at the University of Chicago, where she plans on majoring in economics. Having met some truly incredible people during SLI and CBD 2011, she is looking forwards to another amazing summer with CYI.

Michael Yee, Design Coordinator
Michael is a rising senior at Stuyvesant High School. He has been affiliated with CYI for two years. He participated in CBD '10 and CLP ’10-‘11. He is excited to be coordinating CBD this year and hopes to make it a memorable event.

Yee Gee Cheng, Voter Registration Coordinator
Yee Gee is a rising senior at Stuyvesant High School. She volunteered at CBD in 2011, but this year will be her first year being part of the CBD team. She looks forward to meeting new people and learning new skills that will allow her to empower, inspire, and educate youth.

Jenny Li, Program Advisor
Jenny is a rising junior at Brown University and is the advisor for CBD weekend for her second year. She has been involved with CYI since 2009: volunteering for CLP, facilitating a workshop on environmental justice for CBD ’10, and facilitating for SLI ’11. She is incredibly excited to be back with CYI and knows of no other place she would rather be.

All our participation is youth-led. Outreach efforts include creating materials and distributing them at various community institutions, such as libraries, the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas, Charles B. Wang Community Health Cen­ter Teen Resource Center, and the YMCA.

Participation for both the 2009 and 2010 Con­ference and the CBD was suc­cessful. About 100 participants at­tended the conference and over 200 participants participated in the clean-up the following day. CBD is regularly covered by lo­cal newspapers, including World Journal, Sing Tao, China Press, and the Downtown Press. Sino­vision covers the event as well.

Get Involved

We will be opening registration for the conference to high school students in July. If you are interested in facilitating a workshop for the youth conference, email cleanup@cyinyc.org.