On January 27th, Sam Woldemariam and I met up with an old friend of ours from high school, Wesley Zheng. Wesley has started working in the nonprofit space as an intern at Asian Counseling and Referral Service (ACRS), and we had a great podcast conversation with him about all the ways ACRS helps community members of all backgrounds. There were many different things that we talked about in that podcast episode that you can listen to, but there was something that caught my ear and I wanted to write about, too. And that is how the goals and systems of the nonprofits we work at are.

 

We talked about all the ways that ACRS supports individuals that come to them. They have ways to support language learning, job preparedness, food access, technology literacy, pharmacy, mental health. The list goes on! And we learned that ACRS organizes its system on the individual level. Many people will have different needs, so the system is to adjust to the individual needs. That was a very interesting topic because we found that RBAC has almost an opposite system. We have more systems with goals for the neighborhood as a whole rather than the individual. With all our programs and projects relating to safety, learning, economic development, and food justice for the whole neighborhood, we concluded that even though there are different ways to run a nonprofit, each has its strengths and things to cater to. If anything, that is why nonprofits partner with each other so often! Because we can support each other with our strengths, and that just means our community is that much more supported!

 

And, of course, there was so much more that we talked about in that recording session, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the whole episode for you. I want to thank Wesley Zheng and ACRS for collaborating with us on this episode, and we hope we can work together to support South Seattle even more!

 

Learn more about ACRS and its services here. 

 

Best,

Messiah

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