Meeting notes for meeting on 9/20/08.

Attendees: Brian McNamee, John Downey, Jimmy Wong, Wendy Chan, Frank Chan, Betty Yau, Kai Lau, Cathy Ko, Kevin To, Victor Ng, Lola Tom, Ankur Tandon and David Yi

Meeting was called to order at 10:15am by co-chairmen, Jimmy Wong & John Downey.

-         Quality Interpreter’s Services

It is observed that the significant number of Asian in the community now requires good quality interpretation in open/community meetings to provide accurate information. If some community members are misinformed or less informed due to inaccurate interpretation, well educated community decisions will not be reached.

Meeting attendees discussed ways to help make this service more accessible. The agreement is to organize a mini conference to address the issue and to raise awareness on its importance. The format of the conference will tentatively be for a Saturday morning with one keynote speech and one workshop. At end of workshop, participants will be asked to fill out a form and/or to submit a resume to recommend people who possess the skills. This information will be stored/screened by the Quincy Asian-American Advisory Committee. The information will be shared with organizations/ companies who may be looking for candidates for interpretation jobs in the future.

Organizations like BU, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, the Boston Public Health Commission who run interpreter trainings will be contacted and invited to join us in the planning.

-         Language class as a bridge to engage community members in civic activities:

We’ve been talking about holding Mandarin classes to reach out to the English speakers and to the good English/ Cantonese speaking members in the community. A language program has been drafted out. This program is not limited to Mandarin/ English. We are considering being more inclusive and comprehensive to accommodate needs of other groups, such as Vietnamese and Spanish. The first courses of the series will be focused in Mandarin which will be held in early next year. For more information, please click: http://www.quincyasian.org

-         Web site:

Ankur Tandon is working on a new web site. We will spend half an hour of our next meeting to review and to discuss content.

Next meeting: Oct 25, 2008, Sat at 10:00am.

Meeting adjourned at 12:10pm.

Respectfully submitted,
Betty Yau