Dear TAP-NY Family,
Reflecting back on 2018, it was truly an exciting year filled with fun events, new members, and lifelong memories. We started the year evaluating our impact and ensuring we make a positive, lasting one within our local communities. We hope we did just that, with a few highlights of 2018 including a wellness series (yoga, dance, meditation, and mental health discussions), our first Your Power, Your Politics political engagement event, our interpretation of “The Amazing Race,” and a data science panel. These portray only a fraction of the diverse events we organized for the TAP-NY community.
As we welcome 2019, we are actively thinking of innovative ways to continue building on our accomplishments from last year. We have worked together as a board to update our mission statement and values. At our core, we exist to foster and strengthen our Taiwanese American community, while remaining open to all regardless of background to join us at our events and to experience our culture. From the Crazy Rich Asians’ #GoldOpen to the 2018 election (and re-election!) of many Taiwanese Americans into office, we feel a renewed sense of responsibility to ensure that we are socially relevant.
To further align with our values, some ideas we plan to host more smaller setting events to allow members to build stronger relationships with each other, continue with our Your Power, Your Politics events to promote political engagement, and run an entrepreneurial challenge to support professional development. We will also have our classic events, such as our TAPpy Hours, dinner series, Lunar New Year banquet, and ski trip. Moreover, we welcomed more programming chairs on our board this year, with two Cultural Chairs and two Professional Chairs, along with two Social Chairs as we have historically had.
We already have a roundup of events for the next few months and to make things even more exciting, we are proud to announce and share TAP-NY’s new website! Over the last few months, we conducted research to help design a more streamlined web experience that makes it easier for TAP-NY members and partners to find information and get involved. A special shout-out to Andy Tien and Jordan Hu, our two board members who spearheaded our website development and brought this new look to life.
2019 will be a year of growth, impact, connection, and fun, and we are thrilled to lead TAP-NY through this period of excitement! As always, we thank you, our members, as you are what makes our TAP-NY community so special.
Cheers,
Ben, Julie, and Jen
Co-Presidents and Vice President (PVP)
