2022 SLA Showcase

ACDC’s A-VOYCE Summer Leadership Academy (SLA) is a six-week-long leadership program serving high school-aged youth. More information here.

Photo by Harrison Tran

Hello everyone, I'm Jacky and I'll be writing the 2022 SLA blog post! I was a Communications intern for ACDC and also a SLA participant.

For SLA’s final project this year, we decided to center our showcase around the past, present, and future of Boston’s Chinatown. More specifically: the origins of Chinatown, redlining; what Chinatown looks like right now; current problems and joys Chinatown residents are experiencing, placekeeping/growth for Chinatown, and more.

Past Chinatown

by Jacky Li, Chelsea Tang, Zhuo Yan Jiang, Ange Najam, Helen Ke

Our project focuses on 5 different topics, each catering to our own interest in Chinatown. The five topics range from rather general topics like: Redlining, Combat Zone, and the Construction of the Highways; while also touching on more specific events, such as the creation of Nine Man Volleyball, and the Funeral Raid. Our overall goal is to create a visually appealing way of presenting our research, as a result we created a collage with various hand drawn and printed visuals. This is both informative yet engaging to other individuals.

 

Present Chinatown

by Angela Phu, Miaoyi Hu, Yuhe Chen, Mary Doan

Our project shows the many aspects of Chinatown by using the format of a manga/comic. It’s to show appreciation and love for the city itself and how it’s so important to us but also the people who come and live here. Our story is connected to a previous folktale that the SLA facilitator, Katrina, told the youth. Many symbolic parts of Chinatown were incorporated into the story such as the Chinatown Gate, CPA, and ACDC. The purpose of our project was to show the many places of Chinatown that the residents and people love about it, but to also bring a smile to people reading this comic about this strange story of Brian’s “origins” before SLA.

 

Future Chinatown

by Zubair Hasan, Donald Ma, Mathew Xie, Winiel Xie

Our project was a 3D recreation of a more futuristic Chinatown. We made changes to Chinatown with ideas on how we could benefit the future Chinatown. We tried to make our model as realistically accurate as possible while also retaining the Chinatown theme. The purpose of our project was to show a potential future that could come. With our plan we also tried to incorporate as many needs as possible and prioritizing what current residents want.