MOCA Young Professionals

The MOCA Young Professionals (YP) Program's goal is to develop the present and next generation of professional leaders and provide a dynamic forum of cultural, social, and education programs for members, while preserving and appreciating the contributions of past generations of Chinese in America.

 

Become involved with MOCA YP Committees!
Whether you’re interested in planning events or driving membership, the MOCA Young Professionals Program always welcomes new ideas and dedicated members. Please refer to the following ways you can become more involved, and sign up for a committee at yp@mocanyc.org today!

 

Events Committee
The MOCA YP Events Committee develops and implements YP cultural and social programming, such as our upcoming YP Gala and the Experience + Exchange panel series.

 

Fundraising Committee
The MOCA YP Fundraising Committee generates resources for the YP Program itself and contributes to greater institutional funding and corporate and individual donor relations.

 

Membership Committee
The MOCA YP Membership Committee is dedicated to audience and membership outreach, promoting the growth of the YP Program and the Museum as a whole.
  

For more information on the Young Professionals program and to be added to our mailing list, please email us at yp@mocanyc.org.

 

Or, become a MOCA Member online and join the Young Professionals program today!

 

PAST EVENTS

Experience + Exchange:

A Conversation Between Dessert Mavens
Wednesday, July 21 from 7pm-8:30pm

 

Young Professionals Experience & Exchange: A Conversation Between Dessert Mavens from Museum of Chinese in America on Vimeo.

Registration for this event is now closed. As of Monday, July 19 you may add your name to the waitlist by emailing Jenny Wong at jwong@mocanyc.org.

Do you dream of leaving your job to study pastry making at Le Cordon Bleu? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to start your own cupcake business? The idea of making a career change is always daunting, yet some are able to successfully take the plunge and turn their gastronomic hobbies into lifelong pursuits. Jansen Chan, Executive Pastry Chef at Oceana Restaurant and Tawny Ong, Founder of Desserts by Tawny Ong, will share their experiences leaving their original professions and entering the food industry, delving into everything from their culinary influences and childhood food experiments to their opinions on food bloggers and Yelp’ing at the dinner table.

Please join us for this illuminating conversation on career inspirations, aspirations, and decadent desserts moderated by Ming Hu, MOCA YP Member and ardent food enthusiast, on Wednesday, July 21 at 7pm.

Limited space available - RSVP required. Please RSVP with Jenny Wong at jwong@mocanyc.org
Admission: $10 suggested donation; Free for MOCA Members + one guest.
 

 

JANSEN CHAN, Executive Pastry Chef of Oceana

Jansen Chan, Executive Pastry Chef of Oceana in New York City, has been indulging diners with his sumptuous and visually arresting desserts and artisanal breads. After completing his architecture degree from the University of California, Berkeley, Chan attended the Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. He has worked at the Fifth Floor, Mix in Las Vegas, and Alain Ducasse at the Essex House. His desserts have been featured in Food & Wine and on the Food Network, and were declared "splendid" and "a delight of flavors" by the New York Times.

 

 

TAWNY ONG, Founder, Desserts by Tawny Ong

After graduating from GE’s Financial Management Program and working in the finance world, Tawny Ong felt restless and wanted to try her hand at something entrepreneurial. She passed by the open doors of a well-known New York City cupcake bakery and was captivated by the smell of baked goods. "That was it for me, everything just felt right," recalls Ong. "I went in for an interview, quit my job, and started serving coffee the next day."

While Ong learned the business of baking from the bottom up, she studied at the Institute of Culinary Education. In 2007, she formed an S corporation and took a year to perfect her recipes and set up a commercial kitchen in a rented space 40 minutes north of the city. "I went to Babson College, which is No. 1 in entrepreneurship. I am now getting back to those roots."

The founder of Desserts by Tawny Ong bakes with organic ingredients whenever possible, avoids generic brands, and has a special fondness for her own versions of Southern-style desserts. Ong does just about everything herself—shopping for ingredients, baking, delivering—as well as marketing her business to individuals and corporations. She has catered several times for the Mayor at Gracie Mansion, has been featured in Fox Business News as well as in awarded in TimeOut NY as one of NYC’s best wedding cakes. She recently fulfilled an exciting order – a Welcome Home cake for Lady Gaga’s for her Monster Ball tour at Radio City Music Hall. Ong is currently looking for a home for her bakery in Manhattan.
 

 

MING HU, MOCA YP Member and Conversation Moderator

 

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics & Economics, Ming Hu moved to New York to work in finance at Credit Suisse. An active MOCA YP member, Ming rows for the inaugural MOCA Dragon Boat team and participates in various YP committees and volunteer activities.

With her childhood rooted in her parent’s Chinese take-out restaurant, Ming cultivated a strong enthusiasm for food at a very young age. Through the recent creation of her own food blog and scouring the city’s culinary scene, she is constantly exploring new and exciting ways to become reconnected with the food industry. Inspired by Jansen and Tawny's stories, Ming hopes that MOCA's Young Professionals are also encouraged to follow their culinary dreams.

 

 

Support MOCA's First Dragon Boat Festival Team!
Saturday, August 7th, 2010 and
Sunday, August 8th, 2010

Flushing Meadows Park, Queens
FREE ADMISSION (rain or shine)

Come out and support MOCA's inaugural Dragon Boat Festival Team! MOCA will debut our first team in the annual Dragon Boat Festival race, which brings together hundreds of local and international competitors in an afternoon of friendly competition.

Want to find out more information about Team MOCA and how to support us? Please email: yp@mocanyc.org.
 

Click here to make an online donation!

GO TEAM MOCA!

 

 

 

MOCA Young Professionals Gala -- SAVE THE DATE!
Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Please continue to refer back to the MOCA website for event updates, or sign up for our mailing list at yp@mocanyc.org.

 

 

Young Professionals Summer Social with the MOCA Board of Trustees
Tuesday, June 22

Young Professionals Summer Social co-hosted by the MOCA Board of Trustees on Tuesday, June 22nd from 6:30-8:30pm.
 

Come mingle with Board members Clarence Kwan (National Managing Partner, Chinese Services Group, Deloitte LLP), Mei Mei Tuan (Founding Partner, Notch Partners LLC), and Board Chair Jonathan K. Ligh, M.D., F.A.C.S. (Vitreoretinal Surgeon), along with other Young Professionals and learn more about MOCA YP!

 

Experience + Exchange:

A Conversation Between Community Champions

Wednesday, May 19th

 

 

Young Professionals Experience & Exchange: A Conversation Between Community Champions from Museum of Chinese in America on Vimeo.

 

Reflect for a moment about Chinatown.

 

What images are evoked? What emotions?

 

Is the community featured prominently in any scenes from your past? Does it play a role in your life today? How does it fit into your plans for the future? Chances are, Chinatown means something a little different to every one of us and, regardless of our personal involvement with Chinatown, it is hard to deny the neighborhood's connection with the Chinese American ethos.

 

It is therefore worth taking pause to identify our relationship with this neighborhood and further ask ourselves: What should our connection to Chinatown be? And what, if anything, does Chinatown need from us?

The Young Professionals program at MOCA has invited two individuals who have immersed their lives' work in thinking and working through these questions - Tomie Arai, a public artist whose work fundamentally draws on and incorporates its community context, and Thomas Yu, the Director of Housing Development at Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE) and the Executive Director of Downtown Manhattan Community Development Corporation (DMCDC).

 

Join us for an evening of conversation moderated by Gerald Lam, MOCA Young Professionals Member, and be inspired to discover your own connection with Chinatown.

 

TOMIE ARAI, Artist

Tomie Arai is a nationally exhibited public artist based in New York City. Employing installation, printmaking, and mural as her medium, Tomie’s work examines issues of cultural identity, the role of memory in the retelling of a collective past, and the relationship between art and history, all of which use the specificity of a singular experience to locate a broader sociocultural context and a common ground. Through collaborations with other artists and non-artists such as writers, architects, historians, curators, Tomie’s work often incorporates multiple points of view that reflect America’s rich cultural diversity.

 

Tomie’s art can be found in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Japanese American National Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the New York Public Library. She has painted murals with community groups on the Lower East Side and has designed permanent public works of art for the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Program, the NYC PerCent for Art Program, the Cambridge Arts Council, the MTA Arts for Transit Program, the Artists & Communities: America Creates for the Millennium Project, and the New York City Board of Education. She has received numerous awards and grants from several prominent organizations, including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Urban Arts Initiative, and the Asian Women Giving Circle.

 

Tomie has been actively involved in the Museum of Chinese in America since her tenure as the President of the Board of Directors from 1996-1997, creating numerous works of public and private art over the past two decades that reflect the experiences of Chinese in America. Her latest collaboration with MOCA and writer Lena Sze is entitled, “Archaeology of Change: Mapping Stories of Gentrification in New York Chinatown.”

 

 

THOMAS YU, Director of Housing Development at Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE) and the Executive Director of Downtown Manhattan Community Development Corporation (DMCDC)

 

Upon immigrating to the United States from Hong Kong, Thomas Yu and his family lived in various tenement housing settlements in Chinatown before taking up residence in the NYCHA housing on the Lower East Side. His lifelong connection to Chinatown began with his attendance at PS 124 Yung Wing School and its after-school daycare program managed in conjunction with the Chinese-American Planning Council, where he later volunteered during summer vacations and between weekend Chinese classes at the Hamilton-Madison House.

 

Thomas was exposed to community organizing at a young age when his parents, who were garment factory workers, brought him to rallies held by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and UNITE. After completing a planning internship with Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE) in 1997, Thomas returned to AAFE in 2001 to work full-time with the organization’s low-income housing initiatives, overseeing the development of over 275 low- to very low-income family housing in Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and Queens, and bringing in $50 million in public and private housing and infrastructure reinvestment. Additionally, Thomas also serves as the Executive Director of Downtown Manhattan Community Development Corporation.

 

Thomas is currently the Board Director of the Hester Street Collaborative and is a board member of NYS Tenants & Neighbors, the Chinatown Youth Initiative (CYI), and the Furman Center’s 2008 State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods. He was also recognized by Time Out NY as one of the city’s up-and-coming community leaders, and received the Affordable Housing Finance’s Young Leader Award in 2008.

 

Thomas received his B.A. in Government from Harvard University and an M.A. in Urban Planning from the NYU Wagner School of Public Service. Thomas is a published short story writer and tries to write more in his spare time.

 

Experience + Exchange:

A Conversation Between Entrepreneurs

March 17, 2010

 

In case you missed it, watch the program here:

Young Professionals Experience & Exchange: A Conversation Between Entrepreneurs from Museum of Chinese in America on Vimeo.

 

 

As a part of YP's larger panel discussion series, Experience + Exchange: A Conversation, our first installment, A Conversation Between Entrepreneurs, brought together Danielle Chang, Founder of LuckyRice, and Shawn Liu, Co-Founder of Harvest, in a discussion facilitated by Daniel Blank, Creative Director of Bureau Blank.

 

Serving as a forum based on dialogue between two individuals (an established professional and an emerging talent) in a common field, the event’s objective was to introduce, inspire, and connect young Chinese American and Asian American professionals with the stories and journeys of the invited speakers. Through these influential interactions, the speakers shared their respective experiences and practical wisdom, while the young professionals explored and considered the lessons learned.

 

 

YP 2010 Lunar New Year Tiger Banquet

Ringing in the Lunar New Year, the Young Professionals Program's 2010 Tiger Banquet featured an 8-course meal held at Red Egg, with plenty of raffle prizes and interactive games.

 

YP Members at the YP 2010 Tiger Banquet, held at Red Egg, in Chinatown.

 

 

YP Members and guests at the 2010 Tiger Banquet.

 

 

 

Story In Style: T-Shirt Design Invitational Panel

Aligned with MOCA’s commitment to intergenerational exchange, Story in Style: T-Shirt Invitational encouraged participating designers to engage in dialogue about their family’s heritage and history as inspiration in creating their custom art pieces. Each designer showcased their artwork, shared an intimate part of their family’s history, and discussed how that journey inspired their design in a panel moderated by Cheryl Tan.

 

Henry Lai and David Lee, the two YP Story in Style: T-Shirt Invitational winners, with S. Alice Mong (center), MOCA Director.

 

 

Henry Lai, pictured with his winning design, friends, and family.

 

 

For more photos from past YP events, please visit our Flickr page.

  

 

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