I went to the Children Moon Festival 2010 Kickoff meeting and we discussed last year and what changes needed to happen this year. Turns out that there was a consensus that, although we wanted to hold the festival downtown in order to have the city officially recognize and fund the project in the future, I explained to the group that with substantial budget cuts, it wasn't likely the city would take on additional projects, something I learned while attending a Vietnamese American Community Center meeting from City of San José staff a few weeks ago. Therefore it made sense to start looking at a local high school as a venue. Cẩm-Vân Lê already has connections and will be following up with the schools, and I am to start shadowing her as her intern.

But understanding the need for the committee to organize for the children and their parents, I also voiced UVSA's need to reach out to youths my age, and so I proposed the possibility of a two-day festival in which Sunday can focus more on programming geared for youths and Saturday more for family, a good compromise I think. We'll have to see what the schools say when we meet with them.

After the meeting I had a heart-to-heart with Cẩm-Vân Lê and talked about why she has stayed in organizing this festival for so long. She did try to hand off the festival to other groups twice, but twice they failed and she had to come back in and restart it from scratch. Her experience, she tells me, is that sometimes people underestimate how much work organizing a festival really is, and so they start cutting corners and then ultimately lose momentum. And then she comes back in and restarts it again. I mean, sure, it's great she can restart a project from scratch, but it's hard to progress when we have to do that. So from her experience, we need a way to make sure that when people step up to the Directorship roles, that they are able to fulfill that role faithfully.

So how can we make sure that we create sufficient leaders to step up and retain them in order to build their experience? My first thought is to start networking with Asian Pacific American leadership groups to either move our youth leadership potentials through their programs or replicate their processes. I also need more graphic designers and web designers. I'm thinking of paying Art Departments at local universities a visit and forming a collaboration with them. Blasting out emails hasn't been very effective.