Dear friends, volunteers and sponsors, Happy New Year to everyone!
As the clock is ticking, 2023 is departing from us, while the train of 2024 is rolling towards us!
As we bid farewell to the old and welcome the new, let us take a moment to review the achievements of ECSSEN Career School in the past year. Allow us to express our sincere gratitude and extend festive greetings to everyone!
This is the current organization chart and programs of ECSSEN Career School.
The school is diligently following this management framework, carrying out its work in an organized manner.
The Love Heart Food Distribution is one of the community service projects of our school.
Over the past year, the Love Heart Food Distribution organized volunteers to transport 610,000 pounds of food. Out of this, 360,000 pounds of food were directly distributed to the community, while 250,000 pounds were sent to 38 charitable organizations. Volunteers covered 157,000 mileages in delivering these food supplies, distributed them in the community 1,348 times, and approximately 865 families were benefit from the program 45,000 times. Regardless of extreme weather conditions, our volunteers always timely and effectively distributed donated food from businesses to families in need, benefiting families as well as preventing food waste.
In addition to fulfilling the daily community distribution tasks, the Love Heart Food Distribution witnessed many touching instances over the year, fully demonstrating the mission and vision of our school. Alberta wildfires ravaged and spread during the past scorching summer, forcing many families to temporarily leave their homes and resettle across the province, our Edmonton team collaborated with local churches to distribute our love food to these families promptly, assisting them in overcoming difficulties.
We organized 50 volunteers to participate in the annual Alberta highway cleanup campaign, helping leave a beautiful environment for everyone.
During Thanksgiving, the Love Heart Food Distribution purchased fresh food and distributed it to nearly a hundred of needy families. We also organized volunteers to distribute food in Calgary's most impoverished communities, bringing love and warmth to these families.
On Christmas Eve, our volunteers continued their community food distribution as usual. An elderly couple under our care specifically brought a box of chocolates to express their thanks to our on-site working volunteers for their hard work throughout the year. The love and efforts put in by volunteers transformed into trust and appreciation. Our charitable programs received recognition and praise from all sectors of society, bringing solace and gratification to all volunteers involved.
The Chinese Emotional Support Hotline is another community service project of our school.
The year 2023 marked the third year of operation for the Chinese Emotional Support Hotline. This hotline provides emotional support, relief, and guidance to callers in Chinese. It aims to help callers explore effective strategies to cope with difficulties and pressures while recommending relevant social service information and resources.
Regardless of location, dialing 587-997-5977 connects individuals to over 100 trained volunteers who are available 24/7 throughout the year, providing heartfelt services in Chinese.
In 2023, the Chinese Emotional Support Hotline received nearly 4,000 calls. Callers not only originated from Alberta but also from British Columbia, Ontario, the United States, and Hong Kong, seeking assistance through this hotline.
During 2023, the Chinese Emotional Support Hotline gained more recognition from the public. It collaborated with agencies such as Alberta Health Services, Calgary Police Service, and Calgary Distress Center and participated in their professional training programs.
In 2023, the Chinese Mental Health Forum hosted 12 online mental health seminars, spreading awareness about mental health and cultivating positive health perspectives within the Chinese community. These seminars provided information on seeking helps in mental health and attracted approximately 1,500 participants throughout the series seminars.
Regarding the Career Salon program, besides being organized by ECSSEN Career school this year, we also collaborated with several organizations to hold several seminars:
- Introduction of Youth Employment Resources
- Perspectives
- Road to Medicine which is co-hosted with LINK CC
- Health Care Aid 101 in collaboration with CaSURE Calgary Supportive Responses
- Seminars on drones
- Employment in banks 101
The seminars were warmly welcomed by the participants.
To further enhance the management of our school, we applied for funding from the municipal government and invited experts to provide training for the school's management team. The experts held two professional workshops based on research about current school management, aiming at enhancing the efficiency of school development and management.
The workshops covered various areas such as team building, strategic planning, financial strategy, financial planning, and auditing, etc. The goal was to provide practical professional knowledge training across different fields of the school's management, strengthen the school's internal development to efficiently and diversely cater to the various services needed by the community.
Here are some on-site photos from several of our Capacity Building workshops.
Participants gained a better understanding of the various departments and projects within the school through the workshops.
In 2023, the school once again received federal government funding for summer student program and recruited 15 summer students from the community for training. Among them, 5 students specialized in marketing, 9 in software development, and 1 in administrative management.
All the students gained valuable practical experiences.
Additionally, we recruited an intern from the University of Calgary as a social work intern, providing an internship opportunity and Canadian work experience for him.
The Career Development department successfully secured funding from the Canadian Red Cross, fully sponsoring two volunteers to attend college training for a medical nursing certificate.
At the same time, the Career Development department conducted three sets of two-day First Aid training sessions, thirty-nine trainees were qualified as first aid responders.
The instructor of the sessions transformed the dull First Aid training classroom into an engaging workshop with games, enabling the trainees to obtain first aid knowledge and skills with laughter, to incorporate the knowledge from the teacher into their own skill set, and to further benefit those around them and the wider community.
On March 20, 2023, our speech team participated in the Calgary West Rotary Speech Contest, and Brandon and Alice won the individual first and second place respectively!
The mother of Brandon, the first-place winner, said that Brandon got the enlightenment of speech at our ECSSEN Career School five years ago, and has since embarked on the road of speech and debate, and has gained a lot along the way. Brandon’s mother highly valued the significance of our work and said that sometimes a small opportunity can bring unlimited possibilities to a child.
We are so excited and gratified to see the positive results from our initiative several years ago!
For details, please refer to: https://www.jianpian.cn/a/qn0g614
In 1923, the Canadian government officially passed the Chinese Immigration Act (commonly known as the Chinese Exclusion Act) to prevent Chinese from immigrating to Canada. It is 2023 now, the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Our team from the Youth Leadership Project of ECSSEN Career School, together with some other clubs in Calgary, jointly run activities to remember the Chinese Exclusion Act and to commemorate the contributions of the Chinese.
This project includes a series of activities:
- Invite talks on the history of the Chinese Exclusion Act
- Invite families of railway workers to talk about the history of their ancestors and the contributions of Chinese to Canada and Calgary
- Invite talks on the history of Calgary Chinatown
- Visit the Chinese Culture Museum at the Calgary Chinese Cultural Centre
- End the project with a youth speech contest to remember the Chinese Exclusion Act and to commemorate the contributions of the Chinese
This program features teens leading teens. The purpose is to prevent the recurrence of anti-Chinese trends by familiarizing young people with historical stories and remembering the history.
This project has received support from the city government and more than a dozen Chinese associations in Calgary.
For details, please refer to: https://www.jianpian.cn/a/r6s2t3z
As the ending of this project to remember the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the contribution of the Chinese to Canada, we held a speech contest with this theme on July 29, 2023.
The theme of the speech focused on the 100-year history of Chinese in Canada. The competition was in English. Topics of the speech included the following four aspects:
- Honouring contributions
- Intergenerational talks
- Cultural education
- Revealing hidden histories
More than 20 children and teenagers participated in the speech contest.
The project team had formed a strong referee team.
After careful evaluation by the referee team, the final rankings are as follows:
Children group：
1st：Weixuan Jing
2nd：Victoria Ji ，Tianxiao Yang
3rd (tied)：Albert Zhou, Furqan Hussain , JoAnne Zhu, Jade Zhang
Teens group：
1st：Edward Chen
2nd：Nicole Sun, Raymond Dong
3rd：Jay He, Ray He, Hardy Du
For details, please refer to: https://www.jianpian.cn/a/qmr2td8
These are group photos of the on-site referee team, volunteer awards ceremony and representatives of some supporting organizations.
City Councillor, Terry Wong, presented awards to some key members in the volunteer team.
Project sponsor and chief planner, Cynthia Shi, was nominated for the Exemplary Leadership Award by the event organizing committee.
The Youth Mentorship project is one of the youth projects at ECSSEN Career School. The students are composed of children born in Canada, children of new immigrants and international students. Students plan their own activities and are responsible for the financing of their projects. To simulate a working environment, students reach out to potential sponsors and take roles as junior accountants and junior cashiers themselves.
In addition to simulated workplace training, we also incorporate the Chinese culture by introducing and celebrating several major traditional Chinese festivals. Some boys who never did housework at home also learned to make dumplings.
This is an excellent application of the learning-through-play strategy.
These are photos of the Spring Festival activities organized by the children and the reaching-out activities for sponsorship.
This is a Dragon Boat Festival event jointly organized by the children and Rotary.
The picture shows people of other ethnic groups having fun learning to make rice dumplings.
The Special needs children/Youth care and skill development project at ECSSEN Career School has a history of twelve years. With years of efforts, this project has brought a very good reputation to ECSSEN.
Since 2021, ECSSEN Career School and the Light4 Disability Society have been holding Christmas parties for special needs children and their families in mid-December every year. Innovations were introduced each year to provide new experience to the children and their families.
In 2023, we have rented an indoor playground, which provided the children with a safe place to have fun and provided the parents with a relaxing social environment.
Time flies! It was time to leave before we realized. We don’t want to say goodbye. Party ends but friendship lasts, for decades and decades!
The original aspiration of our special needs children group was to tap the potential of special needs children, to arouse public attention and to help with the development of children with disabilities.
On February 24, 2023, we assisted Dr. Wu Ying, an active advocate of care for special needs children, to invite a successful parent to share her story about how she helped her son with severe autism to become an Olympic champion. It was very inspirational to the audience!
On December 2, 2023, ECSSEN assisted another parent group led by Dr. Wu to hold an event for the International Day for Persons with Disabilities. This event aimed to promote the acceptance of special needs group by the public and to ease the social integration of the special needs group.
We want to tell parents of special needs children that you are not alone.
Every special need child is our treasure!
If you don’t give up, we will always be there for you!
In mid-2023, we collaborated with Toastmasters and jointly provided two Youth Leadership Skill Training programs.
A total of 40 students took the training.
Both students and parents gave positive feedback on skill learning.
Each time we recruited teenagers to take roles on student management and let them learn while working.
Toastmasters indicated that the ECSSEN Youth Leadership Skill Training program is the best program among their programs with partner institutions!项目！
Following the success of the event commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Chinese contribution to Canada, the two youth leaders decided to keep up the good work and became even more self-motivated. They spontaneously established an ECSSEN IgniteYouth Club under the Youth Program.
The youth leaders started their job as soon as the club was established.
First, they actively participated in the recruiting and interview of Youth Coordinators for the Youth Leadership Skill Training programs. With their help, two excellent young leaders were hired.
When they learned that ECSSEN was raising funds for the annual Christmas event for special needs children, members of the IgniteYouth Club actively took on the fundraising task of on the streets.
Some members of this club are children who are new to Canada. They are not familiar with this kind of fundraising work and have little confidence.
The young leaders of the club carefully provided guidance to these newcomers, encouraged them and helped them to build confidence. Encouraged by Club leaders, newbies managed to go to the streets to collect bottles and sponsorships.
With excellent teamwork, these children raised a total of more than $600!
Both the children and parents were very happy to see their achievements. It was not only about how much money we have raised, but also more importantly how much practice and experience the children have got!
The 2022-2023 bursary and scholarship projects came to an end at the annual volunteer appreciation event.
- Yuanjie Zheng won the Jun Xiao ECSSEN Immigrants Possibility Scholarship
- Boyuan Ren和Nan Lin won Ailian Liu ECSSEN Chinese Immigrants Scholarship, Social Service, respectively
- Jason Louie won Sam’s ECSSEN Sports Award
- Andrew Wang won Fion’s ECSSEN Arts Award
Big congrats to the winners!
Volunteers are very valuable to ECSSEN Career School.
The growth of ECSSEN Career School in the past 20 years cannot be achieved without the support from our volunteers!
We are very grateful and proud of having the support from so many volunteers, sponsors and individuals over the years!
All colleagues at ECSSEN Career School sincerely wish you and your family a very healthy, happy, and safe new year! Happy holidays!
Executive Committee, ECSSEN Career School
December 31, 2023