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Dear Team Cantonese Supporters,
We wish you a healthy and happy Year of the Dragon and 2024!
Thank you for your continued support of our grassroots movement to save the Cantonese language and culture. As an organization, we have three goals:
- Protect and strengthen the educational and research infrastructure for Cantonese as a language
- Affirm the value of Cantonese culture and identity in societies around the world
- Build a movement of Cantonese diasporic and language-learning communities to take collective action
Our work is 100% volunteer-driven – Team Canto relies on your support to keep our fire burning. Here are some highlights from this past year, made possible because of the incredible creativity, hard work, and passion of our amazing volunteers. If you’d like to join our Team as a volunteer, reach out to us at volunteer@savecantonese.org. We would be thrilled to welcome you.
Sincerely,
Jamie Tam 譚珍兒
Founder & Executive Director
Protecting Cantonese Programs
- Save Cantonese at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) and our community partners were successful in making CCSF the very first US community college to offer a Cantonese language certificate. This certificate protects future Cantonese classes from being eliminated — but there is much more work to be done.
- As a result of the CCSF campaign’s efforts, CCSF expanded its Cantonese offerings to three sections of Cantonese for the first time in over a decade, with nearly full enrollment!
- Read this powerful and emotional op-ed from volunteers Sam and Ryan about the need for advanced Cantonese education in the Daily Cal. Cantonese fluency is critical for serving our community elders — and can sometimes mean the difference between life or death.
- At UC Berkeley, our partners at Cal4Canto are achieving great success in meeting their campaign demands: Cantonese can now fulfill the general foreign language requirement!
- At Stanford University, we facilitated a $10,000 donation to support the 2023 Stanford Cantonese Summer Fellowship. The fellowship recipients, both PhD students in Linguistics, were funded to study the Cantonese diaspora in San Francisco and Singapore. Our long-term vision is to leverage philanthropic giving and endowed funds to make Stanford a center for Cantonese research and scholarship. This work continues!
- Our K-12 Initiatives team made active partnerships with the California Association of Bilingual Educators and HKU in our shared pursuit of expanding K-12 Cantonese education and empowering Cantonese teachers throughout the Bay Area.
Affirming Cantonese Culture and Identity
- We worked in partnership with Q-Wave to organize NYC CantoQueer DimSum Events – creating safe spaces for LGBTQ+ Cantonese speakers and learners to practice Cantonese at dimsum restaurants in NYC Chinatown. NYC Cantoqueer events welcome queer-identified folks at all levels of proficiency–from beginners to native speakers!
- Our website team compiled key stories in the international English media about Cantonese, both its role in the world, and the efforts to safeguard and pass the language on to future generations. This collection, spanning from 2020 to 2023, forms the core of an Archive for the Future — a record of the courage and dedication of people around the world, working to protect the Cantonese language in diverse, local, and meaningful ways.
- Our volunteer Noah spearheaded the Save Cantonese Zine project: a collection of illustrated personal stories about Cantonese language and culture that features 13 different writers ages 11-74, spanning 7 states, and 2 countries abroad, with beautiful original artwork. Read our stories at our website!
Building Our Movement
- Our TikTok account was successfully launched, reaching 1000+ followers and 200K+ views! Shoutout to Noah whose creativity shines through every reel. We are also now officially on LinkedIn! Follow and share our content to raise awareness about our movement.
- We are Looking for a new Social Media Director and TikTok Content Creator(s)! Are you creative and passionate about Cantonese? Reach out to us about this volunteer opportunity to improve and expand our social media and digital presence (volunteer@savecantonese.org).
- We appreciate donations of any size. Small one-time or recurring donations can be made by Venmo and Ko-Fi.
- Some individuals and companies are interested in large-scale philanthropic giving to sustain Cantonese language programs. For major philanthropic gifts, please reach us at savecantonese@gmail.com and we will ensure your gift is leveraged to maximize impact. (Gifts are tax-deductible through our fiscal sponsor BeChinatown.)
- You can also show your support for our movement with Save Cantonese Merchandise! All profits from sales go towards our movement building.