In March 1982, Sydney Chinese Child Care and Community Co-operative Society (referred to as the Society below, later became CASS) had its first anniversary. When Board members and members met at the Annual General Meeting, they faced a grim situation: the hope of getting government funding was not optimistic.
Members faced the disappointing situation with a heavy heart. Someone asked, “Without government funding, we will not be able to set up the child care service. Many ethnic communities who face similar situations have resolved to disband. Should we do the same thing to disband our Society?”
Henry reminded all those present, “Do we have to have government funding before we provide community services? Don’t forget that we have made a promise to the community that the aim of establishing our Society is to provide community services. A gentleman’s word is as good as gold!” That was true not only for those days. Even for today, the goals and challenges remain the same.
The group reviewed the journey that they had travelled over the past year: designing pamphlets, making copies, distributing pamphlets, organising activities, visiting community leaders to seek their support, etc. There was no government funding, they could still achieve something, though the services available had not been considerable. They had a sudden enlightenment: they would not want to give up so easily.
The Board thus made a decision: “The founding aim of setting up our organisation is to provide much needed services to the community. With our original aspirations, we will achieve our goals whether we have government funding or not.” This has become the unchanging conviction of our Society.
Over the past forty years, CASS has maintained its conviction. Even without funding, we still try our best to serve the community. Whenever there is a community need, CASS will use its limited resources to provide the services. It is such vision and commitment that has made CASS unique and stand out among the community organisations.
How could they provide community services? They needed to organise a group of enthusiastic and committed volunteers to take up the task.
The Australian society embraces many volunteer organisations, such as volunteer fire services, boy scouts, and the then radio 2EA (later became Special Broadcasting Services SBS) which Henry had contacts. These organisations relied on enthusiastic volunteers to carry out respective community work.
Henry was volunteering. His elder brother, Peter Pan, was also active in voluntary work, helping radio 2EA to prepare Chinese news script.
At that time, Chinese newspaper was not available. People usually distributed pamphlets through shops in Chinatown. One channel of promotion was through the Chinese broadcast of radio 2EA. The Federal government provided the venue and facilities for the radio station to broadcast in various different community languages. All programs were run by volunteers then, from broadcasters to script writers. The volunteers came from all walks of life. Henry’s brother, Peter, was a volunteer news script writer.
Peter paid visit the newsroom of the radio station every week to collect the news in English sent by various different news agencies in the world. He made copies and translated the news into Chinese. He also wrote news article about information or news related to the local Chinese community and organisations and sent to the volunteer broadcasters.
With the assistance of Peter, Henry sent information on activities of the Society through broadcast to get people to participate and help with activities.
🤔What sort of work did the volunteers of our Society do at the time? Stay tuned for the next article!
