Hello Everyone,

I can’t believe Thanksgiving has already come and gone. Hope it went well for you.

This is our last newsletter for the year. As long time readers will know, we only create eleven newsletters each year. This gives us a much needed mini-break and helps us realign our release date to be more towards the beginning of each month again.

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This year has been a real challenge for AACP and for me personally.

Once again, we’ve gone through a year with very little face to face contact with the general public. In a normal year, we sometimes go to over 30 conferences and events. In the last two years, we’ve gone to only five. Although these events help us to financially survive as an organization they more importantly serve our primary purpose of exhibiting Asian and Pacific Islander American books and materials to educators and the general public.

With so little direct interaction opportunities, we’ve had to turn to using online methods. We’re still relatively new at this, but I think we’ve made some progress. The biggest advantage is that we’re reaching more people from across the country.

In the coming year, as more events start to happen in the real world, we hope to be seeing you in person again. This will be even more challenging for us as we will need to find more staffing help and more funds for our day-to-day activities as well as virtual work.

We need to decide on whether we can afford to go to three conferences and an out of state event this coming spring within the next few weeks. The exhibit fees, travel expenses, and inventory expenses will probably cost us between five and ten thousand dollars.

At the same time as we’ll be planning and going to these events, we may need help with producing our newsletters and serving people virtually. Staffing is already difficult for many other companies and organizations. For AACP, which has relied on volunteer staffing for over 50 years, we may find it even more difficult to find help.

As shocking events have proven over the course of the past couple years, raising awareness of our place in America and relating the message that we are Americans too becomes even more important to educate and gives us more reason to continue our mission.

If you believe our services to be of value, please help us with a donation and or by volunteering.

Thank you.