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2006 2005 Helping Youth Overcome Challenges 2004 |
HOME > ABOUT US > ANNUAL CAMPAIGN
Annual CampaignThe Asian Pacific Fund presents a report to donors on its accomplishments every year. These updates often address emerging community needs and share the impact of the our work in the past year. The Fund also honors exceptional individuals for their professional accomplishments, leadership and community contributions as part of the annual campaign. Note: Reports to donors appear as they were presented and may not be current. 2007 The following program was presented at the 11th Annual Asian Pacific Fund Gala on October 20, 2007.
Greetings from the Chairman
Greetings
Thank you--all of you--for joining us this evening at our annual gala. We're here to celebrate our community foundation, the Asian Pacific Fund, which was founded more than a dozen years ago to promote the health and well-being of all Asian Americans in the Bay Area. We are here also to thank you, our supporters, for joining our efforts to ensure that our organization fulfills its mission in these interesting times. Many of us know of the ancient curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Yes, indeed, such is the nature of the times in which we live. We live in an age where technology brings us together while tearing us apart, brings us mobility, efficiency and convenience while polluting our planet. Our mobile devices, for example, enable us to stay in touch with our friends and loved ones wherever and whenever we’re within range of a sufficient tower signal ("Can you hear me now?"), while allowing us to ignore, and to be rude to, the people around us. These same devices, along with our ubiquitous automobiles and other appliances of convenience and joy, threaten the demise of our world, our Earth. I am hopeful, however, desperately so, that the same intelligence and dedication that brought us these devices can be brought to bear to help us solve the environmental issues that we have created. Despite my environmental concerns, I, for one, however, am not giving up my iPhone even though I bought mine before the $200 price drop. The benefits of technology include the enormous wealth that has been amassed in Silicon Valley. Alas, even in our region of silicon and gold we continue to have in our midst the poor, the vulnerable, the abused, the disenfranchised. They’re made up of all races to be sure, but in a region where Asians and Pacific Islanders comprise 23 percent of the population, we receive less than 1 percent--about one half of one percent--of foundation and corporate support. Therein lies the reason for the existence of the Asian Pacific Fund. Our communities have contributed to the innovation and wealth of this region but we are disproportionately left behind when it comes to supporting those in our communities who need it most. As the Asian population in the Bay Area continues to grow, our community service agencies are struggling to meet the needs of their constituents, the needs of our people. The Asian Pacific Fund provides these agencies with grants and services and provides guidance to help them strengthen their organizations so that they in turn can help the most vulnerable among us. The Asian Pacific Fund has focused recently on building an endowment to enable the organization to be an enduring resource for the community in the face of extreme funding disparities. We are dedicated to investing in the future of our communities and I am overjoyed, in these interesting times, to be able to make a major announcement later in the program about an addition to our endowment. Like crisis and opportunity, the interesting times in which we live are both a blessing and a curse. The question we face is whether we are wise enough and disciplined enough and moral enough to discern whether we are navigating successfully towards the shores where the blessings of progress and technology await or towards the shoals where the curses of progress and technology threaten our existence. To ensure successful navigation we will need the wisdom and leadership of the kind of people whose stories you will hear about tonight. Some, by dint of their diligence and intelligence brought themselves up from poverty to wealth in such remarkable fashion that no one could blame them for resting on their laurels and enjoying the fruits of their labor. Instead of resting on their laurels, however, they have parlayed their success into resources for our communities, giving back so that others may benefit from their success. You will also hear about and from young people in our community who are well on the path of success and leadership and who have benefited from the type of virtuous cycle that the Asian Pacific Fund is nurturing. Their stories are the type that that reward your generosity. They lead us to believe that we have hope for a better future in these interesting times.
Scholarship Programs
The Asian Pacific Fund has most visibly shown its long-standing commitment to youth through the popular program Growing Up Asian in America, an annual art and essay contest for Bay Area students. Tonight we want to share with you another way we invest in future generations – scholarship programs. Did you know that it costs $16,000 a year to attend a public university? As the cost of going to college keeps rising, Asian Pacific Fund scholarships are even more important. The Fund and its donors support students pursuing their college degrees, and our scholarships get them one step closer to their dreams. One of the common traits we have found among many of our donors as well as our Board members is their desire to give back in a way that truly makes a real difference. Starting a scholarship program through the Asian Pacific Fund is one way our donors are making that personal and meaningful connection. This year alone, our Fund has helped award more than $200,000 in scholarships through programs customized by the donors who fund them. Simply put, we provide the expertise to set up and help administer the programs, but the donors are very involved and get to decide on the scholarship criteria. For example, one family of donors wanted to honor their parents who were farm workers, so they give two annual scholarships to farm workers or children of farm workers pursuing a college education at the University of California. Another family of donors chose to honor their parents by giving scholarships to Asian restaurant workers or their children. Through these scholarship programs, the Asian Pacific Fund has helped our donors give out about 150 scholarships over the last six years, enabling many bright young people to go to college and pursue dreams they thought were out of reach. Tonight you will meet three such scholars.
Having experienced, in his words, “the shame and anxiety that comes with poverty,” Alex says he hopes to help improve circumstances for his family by putting his “gift of intelligence” to good use. He is well on his way to fulfilling that mission. Alex Tan grew up on the coastal plains of Cebu province in the Philippines. Alex and his older brother and sister spent their early childhood years under the watchful care of their parents. Alex describes his father as being very strict, making them do homework before anything else. “Homework before games” was the constant reminder. But Alex also recalls his father’s loving and playful side and how he would tickle Alex’s feet, take him jogging, cook fried rice or pick him up from school. But his father became sick with pharyngeal cancer, requiring trips and treatments that drained the family’s finances and put them in debt. One night, when Alex was nine, the family house burned down. There had been a blackout and a neighbor had left a candle unattended. The only family possession that survived was an encyclopedia set that Alex’s mother managed to save, but even that was nearly ruined by the days of rain that followed. The pages had to be laid out in the sun to dry. A year later, when Alex was 10, his father died. Unable to support three children with her job in the Philippines, Alex’s mother moved the family to the U.S. where she hoped to fare better. They moved in with Alex’s aunt (his mother’s sister) in Union City and as Alex recalls, the transition was stressful. His mother couldn’t get a job right away and Alex felt shy around the house because nothing belonged to him and he needed to rely on his cousins for hand-me-downs. But determination is a Tan family trait, and eventually, Alex’s mother got a job at a semiconductor company that she holds to this day. As for Alex, he graduated in the top 2 percent of his class at James Logan High in Union City, was a National Merit Scholarship Finalist and a forensics state champion, earned a First Degree Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do and became an Eagle Scout. He is now attending Stanford where last spring, he earned a GPA of 3.9. The Banatao Filipino American Education Fund awards five $5,000 scholarships every year to Filipinos who want to become engineers and scientists. More than 300,000 Filipinos call the Bay Area home, but very few of them pursue science and engineering careers despite the region’s lucrative high tech industry. These scholarships are renewable for a total of four years. Dado and Maria Banatao created this scholarship with the guidance of the Asian Pacific Fund to promote execellence in these fields. The Banatao family has worked with the Fund for the last six years to not only support these students financially, but also provide them with academic support and career guidance.
Amrit was born in India where her parents owned a piece of land that they farmed. They were doing fairly well at this, but her father’s best friend, who immigrated to the U.S., told them about the abundance of opportunities here, with much more room for advancement than farming in India would provide. Thus persuaded, Amrit’s father Sodhi came to the U.S. four years ahead of the rest of the family, and he worked as a cashier at a gas station to get started. Amrit was seven when she first arrived in the U.S. with her mother and three siblings. It was an entirely new environment and she wasn’t used to speaking in English. “I cried a lot,” she recalled. But over time, she adjusted and started making friends in Fairfield. Her parents started running a small trucking business while Amrit excelled in school. Amrit played on the varsity badminton team and was a member of the Key Club for four years, all while she worked two jobs and put in many hours of community service. Amrit graduated valedictorian of her Rodriguez High School with a GPA of 4.24. But more than her scholastic achievement, Amrit is proud of the Desi Club that she helped found. “I’m a very cultural person and I love my heritage,” she said. But the real impetus to form the club was the discrimination that her father has experienced in the U.S. “Being a follower of the Sikh religion, my father wears a turban and people associate that with terrorism,” she said. Amrit became president of the Desi Club in her sophomore year and held discussions with other students to raise awareness about her culture and try to eradicate stereotypes. Amrit is now a student at UC Berkeley. She lives with her family in Fairfield and commutes to school, one hour each way. Her financial burden is offset by a scholarship from the Helen and L.S. Wong Memorial Scholarship program set up by the Asian Pacific Fund. Not only is Amrit Kaur part of the first generation in her family to go to college, she was chosen to be among the first class of the Helen and L.S. Wong Memorial scholars. This is our newest scholarship program, created just this year by a donor who wanted to honor his parents. Two $3,000 scholarships and two $1,000 scholarships will be awarded every year, with Wong scholars eligible for additional scholarship assistance for a total of four years. Recipients are Asian students from Fairfield and Suisun high schools, the home community of the donor. He wanted to support students who are highly motivated and serious about achieving their academic and career goals.
Jarrett was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, but it wasn’t until he came to the U.S. at the age of 13 that he encountered the teasing because of his ethnicity. Growing up in a big Filipino community in Saudi Arabia, Jarrett had fit in comfortably in an environment where people from all over Asia and the Middle East live together. But his transition to the U.S. was rough. He recalled the big culture shock of going to a high school in San Jose with gang fights and school strikes. He was also teased by schoolmates because he was an immigrant and spoke a language other than English. When Jarrett and his family moved to Virginia, there were no Filipinos in the school he went to except for one other student. Both of them were on the football team so Jarrett said people would joke around and call them Samoans. “It was 90210, bullies and cliques and no one knew what a Filipino was,” Jarrett said. In 10th grade, Jarrett and his family moved back to California, this time to Soledad where Jarrett commuted to Salinas to finish high school. Until then, Jarrett thought the American dream wasn’t true, even though his father had told him, as they prepared to move to the U.S. in 2000 that “you can go for your dreams in America. Anything you want can be yours.” That promise seemed empty, but in college, Jarrett decided to shake off his disillusionment and “do things my way, to go for it.” And the Banatao scholarship helped make this possible. Although he is living here legally, Jarrett’s immigrant status prevents him from getting federal aid, and the Banatao College Scholarship helped. The program continues to support Jarrett as he studies industrial engineering at UC Berkeley. Jarrett Bato, along with Alex Tan, are among the 26 scholars benefiting from Dado and Maria Banatao’s scholarship program with the Asian Pacific Fund, and the Banataos have already seen seven students to graduation.
We are very pleased by the growing interest in supporting students through scholarship programs. Helping donors give scholarships to deserving students is one effective way of fulfilling our mission, which is to build a legacy for our generation and future generations by honoring the struggles of our ancestors, paying respect to our heritage, and building a stronger, better Asian American community. If you have any scholarship ideas you’d like to discuss, we hope you will contact our staff. Even starting at $1,000 a year can make a difference. Our fee is incredibly modest. For a typical program, it is 1 percent or $100, whichever is greater. So the fee we charge to run a $10,000 scholarship program, for example, would be $100 a year. And while we are the Asian Pacific Fund, we can administer scholarship programs that benefit non-Asian students as well.
Remarks
At different times in my life I have been certain of many different things. I’ve always been certain that no matter what happened, my family and I would be ok as long as we had each other. In high school, I was certain that I didn’t want to grow up to do anything involved with math. And in college, I was absolutely certain that in my four years at Stanford I would never get to say the words: we beat USC. I was wrong on the latter two, but the first certainty has held true. No matter how bad things got, we made it through alright. And I think an important reason why this is, is that in the toughest times there were always other people who were willing to open their hearts to us. When our house burned down my uncle took us in. When we immigrated to a new country an aunt opened her home to us. And when I thought I wouldn’t be able to go to Stanford, a complete stranger offered to give me money to help defray the costs. It is because of these people, people like Dado Banatao who was willing to help a total stranger that I am where I am today. Without their support, I might not be going to Stanford, where I am now a junior studying Materials Science and Engineering. The Banatao Scholarship is truly a great program. I feel lucky to be a part of it. I’ve applied to other scholarships and they are not at all like this one. None of them have the depth that this one has. None of them care so much for the scholars like this one does. Maria cooks for us at the retreats, for example and there are about 30 of us. The retreats are actually my favorite part of the program, where I get to spend time with Dado and Maria and their other scholarship recipients, hang out with such amazing people (despite the fact that about half of them go to Cal), and listen as speakers like professors, professionals, and Dado himself give us advice. This program has truly become a part of my life, and has helped shape my years in college. It has also allowed me to make my dad proud. In my application essay for the Banatao Scholarship, I wrote, “Coming to terms with my father’s death was one of the hardest things I have ever done. In some ways, I am still coming to terms with it today. Going to college is an opportunity for me to honor him. In doing so, I will be achieving his dreams for me, and taking the first step in achieving my own.” There might be people out there who have overcome adversity by themselves. I am not one of them. I have come this far because of people like Dado who believed in me and supported me, and who have held me up when all I wanted to do was fall. And I’ll say it again-–it really is a great program.
Introduction of Dado Banatao
I have the honor of introducing Dado Banatao and making an announcement regarding a pledge to our endowment. We all know Bill Gates; he’s the richest man in the world. Not all of us, however, know Diosdado “Dado” Banatao, even though it would be difficult to imagine a more incredible journey, a rags-to-riches saga that surpasses Horatio Alger and a “do good” story that inspires even the most cynical among us. Let’s start with a brief history of his accomplishments. In my view, Dado’s contributions to technological innovation are unsurpassed. Here are but a few of his “firsts” and the ways that his work and designs have affected information technology:
Dado knows chips and the semiconductor industry as well as any investor on the planet because he built or helped build a lot of firsts in the industry. He has received award after award for his pioneering efforts that played a major role in giving us the computers and mobile devices we use today, including the prestigious Master Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 1997. His beginnings were as modest as anyone I know. He was born and raised in a barrio in the Philippines where there was no running water and no electricity. His parents woke him up at 4 a.m. so that he could catch a bus at 5 a.m. to get to school on time. His father toiled in another country, Guam, for seven years so that the children could afford to continue their education. Dado followed the example of his parents and worked hard--he cites in his speeches always doing extra problems at the back of the book--and it resulted in graduation with a degree in electrical engineering from Mapua Institute of Technology in the Philippines. From there he trained as a pilot for Philippine Airlines and continued his education. He received his Master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Stanford before working in the semiconductor industry with various companies, then starting his own companies and his own venture capital firm, Tallwood Ventures, where his investments include companies that are working on more efficient use of energy and in other ways are geared towards more environmentally-friendly uses of technology. His story could fill volumes and someone is indeed working on his biography. A description of Dado’s philanthropic endeavors alone could fill a single volume in his biography, and if I attempt even to survey the field I will leave no time for him to speak, so please allow me to focus on just one endeavor and that is the Banatao Filipino American Education Fund, which is serviced through the Asian Pacific Fund. For several years, the Banatao Filipino American Education Fund has awarded five $5,000 college scholarships annually to high-achieving students who major in engineering, computer or physical sciences. These scholarships are renewable for three additional years, which means that this fund awards $100,000 or more in college scholarships every year. All of this is made possible through Dado’s largesse. You’ve heard a little about him and you’d probably prefer to hear him speak than for me to keep telling you about him. Before I call him to the podium to make a few remarks, however, I want to make the announcement that I have been eager to make this evening about the pledge that Dado’s family has made to the Asian Pacific Fund. To ensure that the Banatao Filipino American Education Fund is able to continue making these scholarship awards in perpetuity, Dado has pledged to endow the Asian Pacific Fund in the amount of: not one, not two, not three, but $4 million. This pledge of $4 million, which will begin to be fulfilled in 2008, will help build the endowment of the Asian Pacific Fund and enable us to take a major step towards becoming an enduring resource for Asian Americans in the Bay Area. Dado, on behalf of the Asian Pacific Fund and on behalf of the students and families whose lives have been and will be changed for the better through your generosity: thank you. All of the Asian Pacific Fund’s scholarship programs were made possible by the contributions you and others have made. Only through the generosity of our donors can the Fund thrive and reach out to others and make a lasting impact on people’s lives. The Fund can provide guidance if you are interested in starting your own scholarship program. Maybe there is a special kind of student you would like to help, maybe a student of mixed ethnic background pursuing a particular career, or someone who has had to overcome certain hardships. Supporting students through a scholarship program can be a way to honor the people who have helped you succeed in life. If you would like to learn more about the challenges Asian college students face today, please be sure to read our publication Asian Outlook.
Closing Remarks
When we began nearly 14 years ago, we were the only organization making Asian needs and donors our highest priority. And you know what? That’s still true today. The difference is that today, as you can see, we now have some permanent resources that will ensure that we can help people for many many years into the future, whether that help is investing in youth, bringing new awareness to mental illness, or providing better care for our elders. And every step of the way, we’ve understood and taken action to support Asian leaders and those who we know will be great leaders one day. So we thank you for your help and hope that you will continue to support the Asian Pacific Fund. For those who have an idea you want to pursue, please call us. Usually we just start with a simple conversation to exchange ideas. Let’s get started making those big dreams come true. Prior Years To see reports from prior years, please click here. |
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