How Boston’s Chinatown Turns Culture Into Power

This sponsored series is created in partnership with The Culture & Community Power Fund (C&CPF), a national funders’ collaborative advancing the role of culture in building identity, agency, and collective power. This series explores the cultural ecosystem—the traditions, stories, rituals, and spaces that sustain frontline communities—and what it takes to support and strengthen it. Read the complete series.

Boston’s Chinatown has for many years faced incredible pressures of displacement, but a network of nonprofits has turned art, storytelling, and organizing into a strategy to empower the community to fight back.

In this sponsored episode with The Culture & Community Power Fund, leaders of three community organizations explain how the Chinatown Cultural Plan gives their coalition a shared roadmap for collaboration.

"Embarking on this cultural plan allowed us an opportunity to step back, talk to many organizations, community members, see what people are doing, and see how our work complements each other and strengthens each other," said Cynthia Woo, director of the Pao Arts Center at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center.

The center is among a network of community organizations working on the plan that received unrestricted funding from C&CPF, a national funders’ collaborative that supports organizations working on the front lines in communities impacted by systemic oppression. Erik Takeshita, director of C&CPF, says the philanthropic sector will too often “focus on the organization as a unit, not necessarily as the community, as the unit of change and intervention. As a result, you end up with these fractured communities.”

In Boston’s Chinatown, the network they’re supporting also includes the Asian Community Development Corporation and the Chinatown Community Land Trust.

Angie Liou, executive director of ACDC, explains their “anchor strategy,” which uses arts and culture as an anti-displacement tool “and a tool to strengthen Chinatown's boundaries and sense of identity and belonging.”

Lydia Lowe, executive director of the Chinatown CLT, explains how art and storytelling drive their organizing and even helped the land trust acquire its first permanently affordable homes.

"Sharing stories is a really important part of strengthening our power,” said Lowe. “Because we want every generation to be grounded in that history and to know that there are struggles that happened before us and we can win and we can make a difference."