Dear Asian and Asian American Faculty and Staff Council Membership:
We write, in part to share some good news with you all as we close out the semester. Over the past couple of years, leaders of campus affinity groups have been working together with the Provost’s office to ask that these groups be better supported and that the leadership of these groups be compensated for their labor. We believe this is important to ensure the continuity of these groups and to recognize the vital labor that they do in helping to recruit, retain, and support minority faculty. The Provost’s office has been very responsive to our requests, and is going to arrange dedicated administrative support for affinity groups to help with things like scheduling and managing finances, among other things. They’ve also agreed that the leaders of affinity groups should earn stipends as compensation for their work. We believe that both of these steps offer crucial recognition for the work that these groups do, and will make them more sustainable and vibrant in the future.
We wish you a joyful and restful holiday season. We very much wish that we could all be gathering in the cozy firelight lounge to toast the end of the semester! And we hope that by next year we are back on campus again to do just that.
In the meantime, we want to share a list of our favorite Asian-owned local restaurants that you and your families might consider patronizing over the holiday season, both to support our local Asian and Asian American community and to give yourselves a break from cooking!
We would love if you all would consider contributing to this list by sharing the names of your favorite Asian-owned restaurants via this google form. And with some luck (and good leadership!) it is our hope that one day again soon, we’ll be planning an AAAFSC meeting catered by or at one of these establishments!
Take care and we will see you in the new year!
AAAFSC’s Executive Board
Tamara Bhalla, Aditya Desai, Soonhee Lee, Shuyan Sun, Fan Yang