Susan Liu is fundraising
$1,016 by 10-16...2020 Edition!
It's 2020, and I'm about to leave my 20s, and I'm asking you to help me celebrate turning 30 (!!!) by giving: in lieu of treating me to any drinks or meals for my birthday, please instead donate that amount to my goal of raising $1,016 for Project: VISION!
2020 is the year I stopped volunteering. For every year since at least junior high school, I'd always volunteered in some capacity: visiting the elderly, teaching at schools, playing piano at hospitals, consulting pro bono, texting as a crisis counselor, and, until I left Chicago last year, advising Project: VISION as an Associate Board member.
I told myself that 2020 was my year of ME: a year for me to focus on my personal and professional goals without any distraction. Then COVID came, and people were dying, and Sinophobia rose, and people were losing jobs, and Black lives were being murdered, and people were in pain and still dying, and now we're at the cusp of this insane election following an embarrassing, infuriating, and quite frankly heartbreaking presidential debate. All this to say: it wasn't the year of "me" after all, nor could it ever have been, because like it or not, we all live in this world and bear some responsibility for helping to shape it.
In organizations like Project: VISION, I find a glimmer of hope. Even though I no longer volunteer with the organization in any formal capacity, I firmly believe that PV students - youth in Chicago's Chinatown - hold power to drive change in our communities. They'll use their academic and service skills to help revive a neighborhood that's been hit hard by both COVID and Sinophobia. They'll use their socioemotional skills to empathize with communities of all races and backgrounds. And they'll use their deepened sense of civic duty to go out and vote, so their generation and those after them can live in a world that's more harmonious than that of today.
There were a lot of organizations I thought through before coming back to Project: VISION; I considered COVID relief funds, black-and-brown-owned businesses, the Biden campaign, and the many, many other organizations that are doing their best to support us through one of the hardest years ever. I settled on PV because I know and trust the team to use this resource to enhance the learning experience, one that has been forced to go virtual like so many others. By investing in PV students, we're investing in a future world that has healed a long, long way from the knocks of 2020.
Thank you for reading this, and for (hopefully) donating to Project: VISION as a small birthday favor to me - any amount makes a difference!
2020 is the year I stopped volunteering. For every year since at least junior high school, I'd always volunteered in some capacity: visiting the elderly, teaching at schools, playing piano at hospitals, consulting pro bono, texting as a crisis counselor, and, until I left Chicago last year, advising Project: VISION as an Associate Board member.
I told myself that 2020 was my year of ME: a year for me to focus on my personal and professional goals without any distraction. Then COVID came, and people were dying, and Sinophobia rose, and people were losing jobs, and Black lives were being murdered, and people were in pain and still dying, and now we're at the cusp of this insane election following an embarrassing, infuriating, and quite frankly heartbreaking presidential debate. All this to say: it wasn't the year of "me" after all, nor could it ever have been, because like it or not, we all live in this world and bear some responsibility for helping to shape it.
In organizations like Project: VISION, I find a glimmer of hope. Even though I no longer volunteer with the organization in any formal capacity, I firmly believe that PV students - youth in Chicago's Chinatown - hold power to drive change in our communities. They'll use their academic and service skills to help revive a neighborhood that's been hit hard by both COVID and Sinophobia. They'll use their socioemotional skills to empathize with communities of all races and backgrounds. And they'll use their deepened sense of civic duty to go out and vote, so their generation and those after them can live in a world that's more harmonious than that of today.
There were a lot of organizations I thought through before coming back to Project: VISION; I considered COVID relief funds, black-and-brown-owned businesses, the Biden campaign, and the many, many other organizations that are doing their best to support us through one of the hardest years ever. I settled on PV because I know and trust the team to use this resource to enhance the learning experience, one that has been forced to go virtual like so many others. By investing in PV students, we're investing in a future world that has healed a long, long way from the knocks of 2020.
Thank you for reading this, and for (hopefully) donating to Project: VISION as a small birthday favor to me - any amount makes a difference!
- K
- M
- S
35 supporters
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