Support Ginger Arts Center!

We are Students for the Preservation of Chinatown (SPOC), a coalition of college students fighting against the proposed 76ers arena right next to Chinatown. We are young people who spent our childhood in Chinatown: going to school and after school programs, visiting our grandparents, hanging out with friends, and celebrating our cultural traditions—simply being Asian American kids growing up in a community who looked out for us. As we’ve grown older, we’ve realized that welcoming community spaces for youth were what allowed us to grow. Unfortunately, these spaces were far and few between.

Alongside Asian Americans United, SPOC is working to open the Ginger Arts Center, a youth-oriented community center in the heart of Chinatown. Ginger Arts grew out of a vision for an open space to nourish the next generation—to foster their creativity and encourage their youthful energy and joy to sustain our community. This space will serve as an open hang-out spot for youth, as well as space to hold various workshops to teach and train youth in community organizing, art, archival research, oral history, and more. Our current plan is to open this community center for one year (March 2024 to March 2025). However, we aim to extend the project beyond the year-long restriction with adequate funding. Our hope is that Ginger Arts will become a permanent establishment in Chinatown to serve generations to come.

There are several programs and workshops that we plan on offering to youth:

ART:

Art has functioned as a healing and liberatory site for ethnic communities for generations. We hope Ginger Arts can continue this legacy and provide a safe and effective space for Chinatown youth, residents, community members, and elders to learn and develop both their technical skills and relationship with art. Functioning as both an active studio and relaxed gallery, Ginger Arts will host regular art workshops, art builds (both for No Arena/Chinatown actions and other Philadelphia grassroots organizations), and art related events. Through a wide variety of mediums and equipment – including but not limited to screenprinting, blockprinting, acrylic painting, watercolor painting, graphite and charcoal sketching, collage, and digital photography and video – Ginger Arts will function as a hub for Chinatown youth, artists, activists, and community members to learn, teach, share, and inform each other through creative mediums.

ORAL HISTORY AND ARCHIVAL RESEARCH:

The history of Chinatown as told by the government or outsiders to our community has historically been misconstrued, undervalued, or erased entirely. The importance of our history written by our community and for our community is invaluable. Part of Ginger Arts will be the documentation of the people who live, work, and find a sense of belonging in Chinatown through oral history interviews, original photo collection, and more. We will hold workshops to train youth in oral history and archival techniques, especially working in a predominantly immigrant, English as second language community. Our end goal is to create an online archive to serve as a hub of the untold stories and individuals of Chinatown.

ORGANIZING:

Organizing and community building in Chinatown have been taught and passed down from generation to generation. The leaders of SPOC were taught how to fight against the 76ers arena by their parents and older organizers who fought predatory construction projects of the Vine Street Expressway in the 1970s, a baseball stadium in 2000 and a casino in 2008. We hope to use this community center to host organizing workshops for high schoolers city-wide. These workshops will teach them tactics of resistance and protest to use not only in Chinatown but also in their own communities across Philadelphia.

MEDIA:

As current student organizers, we have learned much from our elders from our Chinatown community. Documentaries from decades ago have captured our generational fighting spirit against predatory community and for community preservation.

Visual storytelling and documentation is important to the community’s history and current existence. We believe it’s extremely important to document our movement and put people’s stories on the record. For over a year, we have been filming protests, actions, and group meetings for SPOC and aligned movements. Part of our goal with Ginger Arts is to continue documenting our work and begin compiling it together into a set of documentary pieces to share with the community. We also want to train future generations on how to capture these moments by leading media and camera training workshops for youth, so they can tell a compelling story about a real life movement.

Please email us for any questions about our fund or how to get involved!

SPONSORS

This project is supported by the following: Leeway Foundation’s Media Artist and Activist Residency and Asian American Women’s Political Initiative.