Happy 3 Years Old!

Happy Belated Birthday, Outreach for Taiwan! On March 13, over two weeks ago, OFT celebrated it’s 3rd birthday. I’m writing this two weeks late because of it’s been a crazy year for OFT.

Workshops

This was another year of a lot workshops and a lot of firsts as well. Below are all the school we visited:

Rutgers University

Princeton University

Columbia University

Brown University

While it was our third time visiting Rutgers and Columbia, it was our first at Columbia. While this was our second visit to Brown, we debuted our first LGBTQ in Taiwan workshop.

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With ITASA East Coast Conference team[/caption]

Not just that, we did a workshop for the ITASA East Coast Conference team. After which we were invited to have our workshop at ITASA East Coast Conference.

Being able to able to present at ITASA was a dream as Jenny and I had started out three years ago. This year, that dream was achieved…twice. Jenny and I were both invited separated to speak at ITASA Midwest Conference at University of Michigan — Ann Arbor. Hopefully this will be an annual thing.

OFT isn’t even done for the school year. Next week, I will be representing OFT and giving a speech at Case Western TASA’s Plum Blossom Banquet. We will also be returning to UPenn to talk about the LGBTQ movement in Taiwan.

Team Change

While we had some firsts for schools in which we did workshop, we also had our first major change of team. After Jenny and I created Outreach for Taiwan, we were joined, one by one, by smart and passionate individuals who wanted to do something for Taiwan. After a while, we had a core group of original board members. For over a year, we worked together to figure out OFT’s identity and it’s role in the Taiwanese American community.

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However, as some people moved away from the tri-state area making it harder to communicate, and others took to new focuses, our original board members were down to two. Of the ones who left was Jenny. Looking to focus on bigger movements like the Keep Taiwan Free/UN4TW Rally, Jenny left OFT in my hands. While celebrating the great achievements done by OFT this year, I have always want to thank Jenny and our past members for the amount of work they’ve done to get OFT to where it is today.

With old members leaving, OFT gained new faces as well. All the new members were attendees at our past workshops or talks. With this new team, we looked to further solidify and improve OFT.

Future

While in the past we have been wanted to create up to date content about current events in Taiwan, we found that our strength wasn’t in writing news articles, but rather gathering information about Taiwan and making it bite-sized and easy to read. We are calling this Taiwan 101. We are starting on it, but will be expanding upon it. With this, we want to start looking at reposting blogs and getting more writers. If anyone is interested, please let us know.

Three years have gone past, things have changes, but OFT is still going strong. Thank you to all the people that have given us support for the past three years.