Charity Cultural Services Center

Geographic areas served: Citywide

Programs: CCSC currently provides a number of programs that work toward reaching our goals. Our years of experience have taught us that adjusting to life in a new culture can affect the entire family. With this in mind, we offer programs that assist newcomers of all ages. We operate three successful employment-training courses. CCSC's Chinese Cooks Program and Western Cooks Program each provide two cycles of a 20-week culinary training to 90 students per year. Students receive 700 hours of instruction. Our Bartending/Table-waiting program provides three cycles of a 12-week training to 27 students per year. Students receive over 200 hours of training. Recently, we also created another new program called the Asian Apprentice Training Program that assists low-income Asian newcomers in obtaining well paying employment positions in the construction field with full union benefits. The program provides participants with pre-apprenticeship skills such as language education, GED preparation courses, job readiness training, job skills training, and job retention/ re-employment services. In the fiscal year 2001-2002, these programs continue to remain on track to achieve an 80-90% employment success rate. Other programs such as computer training, Postal Exam Preparation Classes and environmental education create even more opportunities for newcomers to become self-sufficient. During the 2001-2002 energy crisis, CCSC enrolled thousands of individuals and their families in the low-income CARE program, which saved each family 20% on their power bills, and educated and mobilized Chinatown residents to increase their waste diversion by 500 tons in 6 months, and up to an average 88 tons per week by month 12, and keeping over an estimated 30 tons of solid pollutants out of the air that we all breathe, and saving participants needed money during the big 2001 Golden Gate Disposal rate increase. CCSC serves the entire newcomer family by offering a program called Families In Transition (FIT), which offers school-based academic support services and other activities for youth. The program engages youth in community service activities and provides at-risk newcomer youth at four local high schools with services including after-school bilingual tutorial sessions four days per week, weekly self-exploration workshops, computer tutorial workshops, participation in cultural events and field trips on the weekends, and home visits to help encourage parental involvement. This program annually provides 120 newcomer youth and their parents with services that assist them in their transition to life in a new culture. The 2001 ?Ancient Wisdom? project narrowed the digital divide for all youth participants, teaching MS Word and MS Front Page, while pairing them up with community elders, in interview, to preserve the elders? stories in a website created by the youth. The website will now be used to disseminate cultural wisdom to other communities to decrease isolation. We have met or exceeded overall program goals, including Grade Point Average improvement, increasing communication between program youth, their parents and school officials, improving social and life skills, increasing self-esteem, decreasing potential for youth to become perpetrators of violence and/or join gangs, and increasing youth's perception of a positive future. This year FIT will expand to serve four high schools.