A recent collaboration between Asian Services in Action and Jin Huo Community brought together high school students and senior citizens from Summit County’s refugee and immigrant communities.That partnership led to the creation of Asian Services in Action Co-Generational Magazine. The publication featuring biographies of community elders written by the teenage students (who also interviewed the elders). It also includes drawings and anecdotes from elementary and middle school students who participated in a summer camp organized by Asian Services in Action, or ASIA. Participants in the project ranged in age from 5 to 95 years old. The idea for the magazine came from Emily Grad, the program specialist of ASIA’s Children, Youth, and Family Services department. ASIA’s co-founder, May Chen, approached Grad about finding a way for her high school interns to interact with elders from Jin Huo Community, a local senior center. The interns were part of the International Community Empowerment Project, a program Grad oversees.Emily Grad is the program specialist of ASIA’s Children, Youth, and Family Services department. Credit: (Photo by Emily Grad)“The idea of the literary magazine was like, let’s have others actually hear your stories,” said Grad, a former English teacher. “Not only for self preservation, but communal learning and celebration.”Throughout the month of June, five high school students — four of whom were from the ethnic communities ASIA serves, Grad said — met twice a week with senior citizens at Jin Huo Community. At first, the teenagers were nervous and the elders were hesitant, Grad said. But eventually, conversation flowed as the two groups bonded over crafts, lunches and games of Mahjong. For 17-year-old Imani McCulloh, interviewing the older adults allowed her to connect with an age group she knew little about. While she has friends of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, McCulloh had little experience talking with older groups due to language barriers.“Now I know more about a certain group that I didn’t know really anything about beforehand, so I could see myself feeling more comfortable just having basic conversations with different generations and people who are in different lifestyles than myself,” said McCulloh, a senior at Akron Early College High School.Relationships are forged over borders and age gapsGrad paired students and senior citizens if they spoke the same language. She and another student would also sit in on the interviews. Throughout the process, Grad watched as the teenagers gained more confidence and the elders opened up more. “By the end, some of the senior citizens, in their very limited English, were just like, ‘My best friend is here!’” Grad said, referring to how the senior citizens would greet the high schoolers. She continued, “[The students] just kept on asking questions. And we were watching senior citizens tell us more and more. Some senior citizens even came back and said, ‘Hey, I want to tell [you] a little bit more that I remember about my story that I didn’t mention [in] our interview.’”Abishak Sanyasi, second from right, works with seniors at Jin Huo Community Center. Credit: (Photo by Anna Chen)The magazine also features biographies on some of the parents of the student interns. Grad said it was a way for the students to learn more about their own families as well.For McCulloh, her conversations with the Jin Huo Community elders changed how she views her home country, the United States.“A lot of the elders that I [met] showed great appreciation for the country, more appreciation in ways than I have seen it,” she said. “They just had a lot of gratitude — gratitude that [I], as someone who’s not an immigrant, normally wouldn’t possess for my own country.”Grad and her interns designed the magazine. It will be available on ASIA’s website Friday, Sept. 27. Grad plans to distribute print copies to the high school interns and the children and adults featured in the magazine. She also plans to give some to ASIA’s partner organizations. She is applying for grants to cover the costs of printing additional issues. While the first issue mainly features stories from the Nepali, Bhutanese, Korean and Chinese communities, Grad would like to produce another issue that highlights other populations ASIA serves, including the Afghan and Syrian communities.The post ‘Voices of refugees and immigrants:’ Local nonprofits create cross-generational magazine appeared first on Signal Akron.First published by Signal Akron.