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Survival in the Dot-Com Landscape

Ly Nguyen, co-founder of OASIS, dreams of finding a facility for recreational and cultural programs for young women living in San Francisco's SOMA district. Photo by Jeremiah Jeffries.

Community organization for S.F. girls struggles to find a home

By Jeremiah Jeffries

While the dot-com culture has fueled San Francisco’s economy, it is also responsible for the city’s spiraling rental hikes. Most affected are low-income families and nonprofits, which are being squeezed out of the city. Ly Nguyen, one of the founding co-directors of OASIS, isn’t letting that deter her, though. OASIS, an acronym for Offering Arts to our Sisters In SOMA, develops leadership-building, and provides arts and cultural programs for young women.

The following are excerpts from an interview with her:

AsianWeek: How did OASIS get started?

Ly Nguyen: I started OASIS with another young professional named Jill Weinberg Pfeiffer. Jill and I met in the fall of 1997. We were interviewing for the same position at the SOMA teen center. It ended up that we both got hired in different positions. I was a case manager and she was the activity coordinator. During that year we both worked together and it was there that we noticed that there weren’t a lot of young women coming in to use the teen center. I was wondering what was going on so I talked to other service providers in the area and they said it was the same in their programs.

So we collaborated with Mercy Charities, a development corporation that has a couple of affordable housing complexes. I got together with the residential coordinators and asked how many teen girls live in the buildings. The coordinator explained that in Columbia Park there were about 15 young girls who lived in the building.

What we did was start these Friday night social groups. I met with them for the first time in their community rooms in their buildings and about 15 girls came down. They were from India, South America, the Philippines and there were even a couple of girls from Russia. They were all excited that I was coming in and that they were going to have something to do on Friday nights.

AW: What happened in those first meetings that inspired you to develop OASIS?

LN: We sat around and we started just talking about culture, “Where is everyone from and where is your family from?”

Their parents were immigrants or refugees to this country and the girls were spending their adolescence in San Francisco growing up with strict parents. For some of the girls it was like, “There’s a war in my country and my parents left” or “my parents were seeking new opportunities” and similar stories. I could sense a lot of pride coming from them when they talked about their experiences.

They even said, “Hey Ly, why don’t we start having these Friday night dinners, or Friday night educational lessons about each others’ culture?” One Filipino girl said she would like to teach us all the dances of the Philippines and make Filipino desserts with us. So I gave them the opportunity to plan three months where they took control and worked on developing these Friday nights in a way that they could share their cultures with one another.

I pick up the girls every Friday. They are the ones taking care of their brothers, doing all the chores and they do not live in large homes. They live in small apartments with a lot of family members, but they do everything. And so for them to come out, even if to just have two hours of their own space, it is so great for them.

Many of the girls were in seventh and eighth grade at the time and a few were in high school. I think that it was really deep that 12- and 13-year-olds were already thinking about culture and taking the initiative to say, “I want to show you what’s up with my culture and I am proud of it.” When these girls are 16- and 17-years-old they are going to be so open-minded, so educated and secure with who they are.

AW: Why did you create a program specifically for girls?

LN: One night Jill and I coordinated a co-ed event about domestic violence and dating violence. We had a group of women come from UCSF to give a presentation-workshop. There were about 20 guys and about six or seven of the girls I had worked with. Here the boys were all involved raising their hands and shouting, “I know the answer! I know the answer!” or volunteering to role-play. The girls were being so timid and I was getting frustrated. I told the girls, “You ladies are not timid, you are so smart, you are so outgoing, you girls are never like this.”

Two weeks later I invited the same group of women from UCSF to come to the community room where it was just the girls, with the same workshop. This time the girls were bouncing off the walls, raising there hands, saying they wanted to do a skit. They wanted to talk about violence in the home and one girl even wanted to talk about a friend who had been beaten up by her boyfriend.

I asked the girls why when they had the same group of speakers at the earlier workshop, they didn’t say anything. “The boys,” they said. “Just look at the boys. I feel like I am at school, you know the guys are being so talkative, and dominating and I can’t say a word.”

I realized they really do feel this way and they are engulfed in that situation at school so in an after school program or a recreational program, they are already tired of it. They didn’t want to deal with the boys anymore at that point in the day.

I think it then triggered the idea in my head that they need a space where they could be free of gender politics in order to learn and be comfortable. So Jill and I said OK, this is a great idea, to have a gender specific program. We always imagined the OASIS being just that — an oasis, a haven where these girls are free to grow and be themselves.

AW: What happened from there?

LN: From there Jill and I started brainstorming in 1998. We both ran these focus groups with different girls in the neighborhood. From the focus groups we discovered that they were interested in culture. They were interested in the arts and they would more likely go to an all-girls center. And parents said they too would feel more comfortable sending their daughters to a girl-specific center.

We definitely wanted a program that focused on the arts. We both do art; Jill is actually an artist and I do photography. We were talking about cultural arts. The young women did not necessarily have to do ethnic-specific art, but they could use the arts as an outlet to express their experience as urban girls and as girls of color. That was our main program focus.

OASIS is actually an acronym for Offering Arts to our Sisters in Soma. Leadership development is also a big thing. We want to see these girls become leaders, someday leaders in this community, leaders to one day take over OASIS. Then there is the educational part we call Helping Hands Tutoring, which Jill is developing. Helping Hands Tutoring will involve tutoring and mentoring, where we will invite volunteers and professional women to come and work with our girls.

AW: What are some of the struggles you have faced?

LN: Space in San Francisco is so sought after and it’s especially political in SOMA. We are competing with dot-coms. We are young professionals in the nonprofit field, so the realtors don’t even give us the time of day. And how can we sign a five-year lease when we are struggling to just fundraise in this first year. We’ve talked to people citywide about it. Lack of space is a problem facing most nonprofits. We have moved into office space, giving us a place to write grants and have administrative meetings and such.

Programming space is one of the things we struggled with when we started and are still struggling with today. Right now we do our programming out of a community room in the girls’ apartment building and out of the SOMA recreation center. Our vision has always been to have our own space, to be this oasis where young women could walk in and see a place with pictures of themselves on the wall beautifully painted. We also need space to conduct dance classes, other workshops and tutoring. We are still limited to only programming a few days a week, since there is no drop in center, which is ideally what we want to have.

AW: What are some of the long term benefits for the girls in your program? What are the basic services that you provide? What do they get out of it?

LN: We have been developing the arts and leadership programs, both of which are going very well. With the art program we invite artists who are women of color to come and do 10-12 week workshops with the girls and have some type of community showcase. Our first workshop was a hip-hop dance class. Recently, a woman named Olivia Malabuyo did a 12-week workshop on film and video with the girls. The girls learned how to access the camera, record their lives.

I still continue the Friday night groups where I do leadership development. Jill is working on the Helping Hands Tutoring program.

AW: What type of support has your organization received?

LN: We got our first grant from the American Association of University Women. We also have some private donors. A businesswoman contributed to OASIS and with her gift we were able to open up an endowment for a scholarship fund so when we launch the tutoring program we will have scholarship monies in place. We also received a grant from the San Francisco Foundation to work with a consultant to help build up the capacity of our organization and develop our tutoring program. We were counting on getting a grant from the mayor’s office, but for some reason we were denied funding from them, which was very disappointing.

A couple of months ago the girls wrote a youth initiated project proposal and they got a grant to offset some of the cost of the photography class. They were able to buy a camera. Then they started making beaded jewelry to sell at one of the city’s community arts festivals. From that they were able to raise money for a camping trip this summer. Here we are with 8th and 9th graders, writing proposals and raising money, so they are learning those types of skills as well.