CHINESE FRIENDSHIP ASSOCIATION OF PORTLAND

The Chinese Friendship Association of Portland (CFAP) has been a non-profit organization since 1993 . The mission statement of this Association is
1. Building a bridge of cultural awareness and understanding, ethnic tolerance, and striving for a more harmonious existence.
2. Providing civic leadership training for youth.
3. Assisting recent Chinese immigrants in Oregon to be productive and committed members of their communities.
4. Helping the Chinese community in need of financial & social service support.
5. Establishing us as a community-based organization working to increase civic engagement and community participation.
As an organization serving the needs of the Chinese community in the greater Portland area and Oregon, CFAP offers a large variety of events in celebration of the Chinese New Year, Mid-Autumn Festival, Lantern Festival and other celebrations in special occasions. It commits to enrich Chinese culture in the Portland Metro area, enhance cultural diversity in Oregon, and promote cultural exchanges between Oregon and China. In 2016, CFAP has participated in many activities such as “Portland Rose Parade”, “Hearing on Rebranding Portland China Town”, “Weekend Shows to Promote Portland China Town”, fund raising for Asian Health Service Center in Portland, 2016 Chinese New Year Gala, Chinese Community Summer Picnic, and Celebration of China’s Independence Day Dinner”, etc. Most significantly, five members of CFAP, representing Oregon Chinese American Community, attended the first ever United Chinese Association Conference in Washington D.C. in September 2016. These CFAP activities have raised the visibility of CFAP in the Portland Metro area. In 2020, CFAP organized the first historical event that Lunar New Year celebration event held in Keller Auditorium with many other Asian organizations. Recently, CFAP has also united with over 30 organizations to raise fund for supporting the fight to defeat Coronavirus in China and around the world.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, CFAP has taken a leadership role in the community to work with nearly thirty other organizations and hundreds of individuals on fundraising, PPE sourcing/purchasing and logistics. We acquired over $125,000 PPE in the extreme shortage period and donated to frontline institutions including hospitals, police bureau, fire department, county health department, housing department as well as emergency center, veteran, and senior care facilities. We lead the communities’ effort to secure over a thousand restaurant prepared hot meals and donating to local women, children, and veteran shelters as well as hospitals. These activities supporting the frontline health workers, emergency services centers, and people in need were well complimented by the public and much appreciated by local organizations and communities with frequent media coverage by Pamplin Media Group, multiple local television stations, radio stations, social media, and other web coverage.
CFAP has extensive experience working with large groups of organizations and communities on various projects besides those mentioned above. One of the signature events was the Lunar New Year Gala. We historically first held the event in the State’s largest indoor stage, Keller Auditorium, which involved many of the AAPI ethnics’ groups and other ethnics group.
As mentioned earlier, CFAP has been selected by OHA as one of the community-based organizations (CBO) to serve on community engagement, education, and outreach as well as social service & wrap-around. Since September of 2020, we have served over thousands of individuals with 530 families who have been deeply impacted by Covid-19. We provide statewide wraparound services to people regardless of their income level and citizenship with specialty in multi-language capacities during their isolation or quarantine periods. These services include, but not limited to, assisting individuals and families with accessing health care providers, grocery shopping and delivery, telecommunication support to access existing benefit programs and connecting to community resources such as behavioral health resources, anti-discrimination resources, domestic violence resources, Dept. of Human Services resources and so on. We organized health seminars such as roundtable presentation with panelist including OHSU professor and OHA Senior Health advisor. We hosted youth distance learning supporting activities. By expanding youth programming into an immersive summer learning experience through a historic public investment, CFAP is again demonstrating the capacity of culturally specific and community-led efforts to meet the needs of their community while simultaneously pushing for systems change that leads to increased representation, greater access to opportunity services, and equitable outcomes for Chinese and AAPI youth and families.
Recently, we have been selected by OHA FEMA to work on vaccine related projects and vaccine education. We have successfully hosted and co-hosted 30 vaccine clinics since the end of April 2021 and registered over 5,000 people into those clinics. We also successfully hosted a community drive-thru PCR testing event with over 200 people received their test at the site.

We celebrate our twenty-nineth anniversary this year. Over the years, our efforts and successes have proven that we can strongly support the community.