college is hard. plus a neighborhood center that helps make dream said come true. and later the beautiful music of markvanolof. i'm mary sit. all this up next on asian focus good morning, and welcome to asian focus. for more than four decades the boston chinatown neighborhood center has been supporting children, youth and families of the asian community of greater boston, in fact the region's biggest social service organization for asian communities. here to tell us exactly how this neighborhood center turns

lee, a nationally recognized performance poet and community educator, holds master's degree in public affairs and an alumnists for the institute of non-profit management and leadership at boston university school of management. that knows for being with us. as executive director of the grand-daddy of all social organizations how do you try to put your personal stamp on it. >> that's a good question. it has more of a reputation than i do, around for 46 years, serving generations of people. same time. parents and children, may be grandparents all at once and so i'm not really here to put my stamp on it, here to make sure we stay healthquy stay response to the needs of the community that we serve. >> and how do you keep current where your group is meeting the needs of the latest group of immigrants or latest needs. >> we were started in 1969 by a group of parents in chinatown who really just wanted a safe place for their children to go after school, on the weekends, during school

place for them, so they created a very important anchor community center for the chinatown community and so we really take those values to heart. we keep it apart of our planning. every year we're thing about what's going on in the chinatown community. >> child centered or family focused. >> fily centered and more than half of the people we serve are thin and youth, and we think of the children, youth as all-important community members for us. serve? chinatown in. >> it is a mix. the people we serve are reflective of the community that lives in chinatown. so many asian immigrants but a pretty diverse selection of other people in the city of boston. chinatown is an urban neighborhood just like any other in boston, fairly diverse and then we have people who don't live in chinatown, may not live in the city but they still come into

>> and that's fine. >> oh, definitely. >> and what kind of services do you offer? things you offer. tell me about that. >> i guess i can break them apartments. three childcare programs, center-based care, home-based care and after-care. and a couple education and workforce programs. we work with youth and adults to help them with english, career skills and what their next stetch in life will be. and then we also have family and community engagement programs, these are a little more in-depth. we work with families, help make sure families are healthy and functioning. we work with parents with special needs, offering them support and make sure they feel sulport and have pier mentors. so a lot of different ins the that we do to just help families and members of our community thrive. >> i'm interested in the career skills that you do, skill teaching. do you have classes to do certain things in terms of skills?

well as res hey and interview help, but most recently something we've done is irk withed with some partner organizations in the chinatown community to get kind of those most in need in our commute see if we could work with them and learn english and also get retail skills. so there is a whole foods that's come to the chinatown area, there is a roach brothers, a walgreenss and there are jobs in those places and we'd like the members of those communities to be audible to access them so we work with them to develop english as well as retail skill. >> that's probably the first skill. >> the more skills the better and english is porn. >> would you say that's the number one need for immigrants or people who come to your center? >> yes. edgelish is the biggest component of what we do for adult learners. >> and are all of your services free, or do you have a sliding scale, how does that work? >> some services are free,

offer them all to the members of the community. so when people are low income we do work with them, for example childcare to get a state subsidy. there are some who may not get a state subsidy and try to self subsidize if we can. we just want to make sure programs are accessible to the peep pool need it most. >> are most who move into chinatown, both like working childcare. >> childcare is a pretty important piece of what we do, actually our biggest program. >> really? >> yes. and families, parents need to irk with, people come searching for a better life in order to pursue their hopes and dreams and want to make sure their children are taken care of well, that their children are safe, that we have high quality care. so the center for early education is nationally accredited, so that's not very collin, about 8% of centers are nationally accredited. so we really hold ourselves to a high stanted. >> and when you say nationally accredited you have bilingual

>> we do. >> so they speak in english and cant these and starting to be more mandarin presence as well. the way the model works, two native teachers, one native and one chinese speaker just to make sureeral children no matter where they are in their language acquisition is valued. >> that's terrific. charles, i noticed bcnc has also been, in two consecutive years received a four star rating from the charity navigator. why is this a big deal? >> charity navigator is an independent body monitoring the non-profit industry and give these ratings out. >> make sure the money going to ritz supposed to. >> financial management practices are transparent and so the charity navigator gave us the four star rating. >> is that the highest rating? >> that is the highest rating.

>> there is a growing unease on what happens when money with charities, but we've been sustain frequent more than 40 years and do that by being transparent and do what we say. >> now do you get your funding? just from donations and private donors and little bit here and there? >> it is a big mix. about 35% to 45% of our funding is through state, state contracts and then about another 20% are through private foundations and corporate foundations and then the rest is a mix of some fees, some gifts, some-- looking everywhere for support. we serve a lot of people and get supported by a lot of peep. >> and individual donors who have done well will give back to the group. say you know what when i was a kid this helped me. >> and actually what's meaningful is people still donate. to give. so when they give something it really does mean a lot. >> it is a big percentage over

>> what is your personal vision in terms of, i know you say the organization keeps go, been there before you and going to keep going after you, but i'm sure you have ing thes you really want to work on and achieve while you're there as sort of a legacy. what are those things you're hopeful for, you want to do? >> well i want to invesin three, i think you could call them three major buckets, one is growth. bcnc has moved out of chinatown for the first time opening up in quinsy. >> so this is like a branch office. >> in our first two years of operation there we have the number one rated adult s.o.l. program on the south shore. >> here is a picture of the kids, they're so cute. >> another is innovation. i think our programs are always responsive to the needs of the community. and the third is on-going stability. i'm proud of the fact we're transparent, we're still here

to make sure we're here for another 40. >> what's your biggest challenge, charles? this is not a trick question. [laughs] >> i think personally i think the thing that i sometimes, that keeps me up at night is that we can't do everything. i wish we could. and sometimes that's tough to accept that with a largest social service provider, around for so long and a good reputation you can't do everything you want to do and sometimes that can be tough. always wish i could do more. >> thank you so much. we wish you the best of luck with the center. coming up next, helping coeds reach their goals by giving them on-line news they can use. we'll explain right after this.

she dropped out of harve afford run a business full-time.

campus.commal her campus has a 5.9 plus million users and offers 15 dorm fram $25. or $25 to be the omsingle friend in your squadric numerous honors including business week's 25 under 25, forbes all-star student entrepreneurs and glamour's 20 amazing young women. that knows for being with us. >> thank you so much. >> my first question is what were your parent's reaction when you said mom, dad, i dropping out of harvard to run a business? >> it is everybody's first question actually, especially >> exactly. and to have a daughter at harveered and for her to say i'm actually going to drop out now. so the bay that that came about was actually we had run her campus for a full year by the time that i had to make that decision, so we started the when i was a junior in college. through that year my parents were able to see all of the success we were getting and all of the momentum going into

by that summer we were named in inc.'s magazine 30 under 30 coolest entrepreneurs. initially i tried to do school and hercampus at the same time my senior year, but it quickly didn't work, business hours, school hours, completely overlapped. >> you're business profitable already the first year? >> we were profitable from the start, never took any investment just by keeping costess low. my parents saw it was doing really bell. i told clem thought this was the opportunity of a lifetime and on top of that harvard has an unlimited leave of absence policy. so we just decided to go for it. >> and you were only 19-20 years old at the same time. >> yes, i was a senior. >> my daughter came to me and said i'm going to drop out i would have fainted. they must be pretty understanding. are they entrepreneurs them envelopes. >> they weren't before but now tackled a couple small

themselves, but i definitely give my parents a lot of credit, they're very, very forward thinking, maybe not your typical asian-american parent. >> so you have one more year you can go back and finish? >> i can finish whenever i want. >> tell me about hercampus hercampus.com. >> stefny wizder and i met as undergraduates at harvard and working with on a publication statement just for harvard covering lifestyle and fashion. and we took over the board and transitioned from a print-only magazine on-line only j. with that transition we saw readership sky rocket, not just from harvard college women but everywhere really globally. so we kind of knew we had hit on something big editorly. there wasn't any magazine out there publication just targeting wolfen. there is a lot of media targeting the younger demographic as well as the

nothing in that 18-24-year-old sweetspot. after the success of the publication we really wanted to make it bigger than just a student organization at harvard so we started thinking about this idea that eventually became hercampus and entered the business competition plan in florida and we were one of the winners in 2009. >> did you get money for that once you won? >> there wasn't free money involved but free office space for three years which is really helpful. weal started working on applatform to let any woman start and that turned into hercampus. >> you have hercampus.com and then you have different campuses all over the country. so they start their own version of that or what? >> so they are like micro sites within our site. or there are also student organizations on campus we call them the my-campus chapters. we currently have 300 chapters

>> do they follow a certain template or write their own stuff? >> great question. we provide a template in turns of these are the content areas, for example features, blog, profiling somebody on campus but within those categories we really give them a lot of editorial ataughtmy on their own campus because every single is unique and that student body is going to # resonate different 3 content, so we have our campus correspondents in charge really set that editorial agenda, recruit writers and connect to their student body. >> who the the final editor in. >> their campus correspondent or editor and chief. >> not you? >> not nationally. >> is this a paid contest? >> it's not paid. life our student journalists are free lancing as part of a student organization. >> how do you make money? >> so we learn early on that we kind of have a captive audience of college students,

reach for a college marble r marketers, so we started having a lot of infoundtrust who wanted to tap into our network. >> they came to you? >> they continue to come to us and we're able to plug them into our network of 11 million college women by districting them to our site # with sponsored content, onhercampus.com or activating our chapters, which are on the ground and at all of these different colleges for really cool vents. little ads on your website. >> ads are part of the strategy. >> or sponsored constent, that means they pay you money to put their content. >> awe'll still write the content, still written by college students but sponsored by a partner. >> like funded by, whereas you control the editorial part. >> yes. it's completely authentic, only write about things that the audience cares about. >> i saw a headline about kim kardashian because oh, no, i'll keep my comments to myself but my kids y mean

17-year-old and always the kardashians and this and that and i'm always like i'm not interested but apparently college girls are because you have a thing on kim kardashian's funniest costumes. how do you pick those topics? do you pick them? >> it's all picked by college women. so the editorial pictures are coming in from college women themselves and they're writing the pieces and in a lot of the cases they're pitching it and writing it immediately. so we're trying to get the headin loos out there as soon as possible. >> now you put a lot of the content into this wonderful new book that just came out, it's called the hercampus guide to college life. tell me ubthis book. >> we're really proud of this book. a lot of people ask us whether we're going to go into print, we find that as a move backward, but we've always wanted to do a book, which is different. this is our first ever book. it is basically a complete guide to every aspect of college life, whether how to eat healthy in the deeping

academmables, how to score an internship after college, how to bond with your roommates, how to stay safe on campus. it really covers every aspect. >> earlier you said this book is like a big sister talking to you. i was just flipping through and talked about five rules for thinking. it is something that happens on college campuses and girls need to know how to act safely and how to, you know, just be healthy and safe on campus, so we want to approach as we know all of these things happen and this is how you can, you know, act to be safe! and then do you talk about nutrition, home sickness and snacking and food you talk about friends with benefits. and what to do about them. and can you be honest with f.w.b. it covers things girls are interested in. >> exactly. reflects a lot of the content we have on our site. we realized we had a lot of high school readers on hercampus.com trying to figure

college, so service that more by publishing this book and write a lot of content around that. >> do you have content vetted around the specialists experts to make sure you have the latest information. >> all of our articles have that vetting process in place so we're able to incorporate nat to the book. [laughs] >> so your mom, as i thought was really clever, college is hard, we make it easier, something like that, right. that's really cute. how do you make it easier? >> her campus offers a wide variety of services and tools and content for our viewers. so hercampus.com is just one part of that # but a large focus of our organization is actually career and career development so her campus as a platform is really a career launching point for world's top journalist alls who are really aspiring for the jobs in the media industry. as that sense we are really seen as that golden seal of approval on any journalists resume when they're applying

and an editor in new york city would see that and say i know her campus, this is a legit kind of applicant. but we're doing a lot more too so we have a summer conference called her conference, which is just completely focused on career development and it is really, we bring in speakers from the industry and we have key notes and workshops and panels to really equip these college women to have a jump-start to their careers and really get ahead. so that's kind of our mentality with everything with her campus. >> did you dream it would come to this when you first started? >> i hoped it would. i think every year is different from the last and crazy how fast we're going. >> dew point to go back to harveered and keep studying what you were or switch nuto business? >> i was actually studying art at harvard, which is very different. we'll see if i ever get back there. >> the best of luck. thank you so much. we'll be able to look you up, her campus.com.

don't go away. she also teaches master class in asia, europe and the u.s. including at tango wood. here she is performing the second sanadda. that's all for asian focus. i'm mary sumpt i'll see you

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