Okay, great.

All right, welcome to our September Asian Affairs Commission meeting.

I call us to order and have us start with reviewing our meeting minutes from last month.

After you've taken the chance to review, we'll take a motion to approve.

So Massude can second you.

Can I get a motion to approve last month's minutes?

Motion to approve the second.

All in favor?

Thank you, Lexi, for taking such great minutes.

As our commissioners can see, but I'll narrate for those listening.

Last month was our first meeting under new leadership.

We transitioned from Chairwoman Gilpin to me with Vice Chair Cecilia Wynne and Massood continuing to be on our leadership team because Commissioner Hossem leads our workforce and education work.

So we had an exciting time just kind of previewing what the year might look like.

And today I'm going to preview an official proposal for how to spend our upcoming year.

That Lexi, do we have quorum to vote on that today?

Incredible.

And we can wait until later.

I know you just took a moon cake bite, but a chance to formally close out your tenure in a meeting.

So with you here today, I wanted to give you an opportunity to just formally pass the baton, if you will.

Yeah, no, I did I missed last month's meeting or the was it August.

What month is this?

Yes.

Or September, yeah.

I was on a work trip, so I apologize, but I wanted to come to the meeting so badly to just address this commission.

I have said this before, but it has been such an honor for me as a Tulson, as a woman, as an Asian American to represent this incredible body of people over the past couple of years, and then Petty So and I worked with the planning committee.

This is such an important commission, and to see it grow and to really like I think increase influence here in Tulsa and also just remain this this mainstay and this anchor that our Asia community can look to for support and representation is really ideal.

Um I have enjoyed working with each and every one of you as I work with you in a different capacity.

You have all contributed so much to the community, your heart, your passion for your people groups, for your cultural groups, and everything that you bring to the table and knowledge the inside is invaluable.

But I'm excited to work with you in a different capacity.

I'm really excited to see what you accomplish, Parisa, because of your intelligence, your insight.

I think that it's a great opportunity for this commission to have the foundation that's been laid, and then for you to just take off and build on that.

So thank you.

I'm very excited to see what the commission accomplishes under your leadership.

Thank you.

With that, I'll be talking a little bit about how we hope to take off this year.

Um, in front of you, and I think most, not all of our audience members uh have a copy of our proposal for our 2026 and 27 focus.

Um, there's more over here.

I can bring you on.

And I think everyone else has covered this.

Um I know our commissioners had a chance to view it, but I'm still gonna give just a brief voiceover to help us orient because we will be voting today on the opportunity to solidify this as a focus and really make a statement to the community about what we hope to accomplish on their behalf.

So I'm excited to have the chance to share this with you all.

At the top, we set some context.

You will know at the Title Five retreat and at every opportunity I can get.

I love to show a map of the communities that we represent.

And I love to highlight the most uh populous ones in Tulsa that range from our Afghan community in Western Asia to our Hmong and Burmese community around Vietnam and Laos to our South Asian Indian community, all the way to the Marshall Islands, where we have our Pacific Island community.

And it is uh not without great stress that we are coming to focus on one thing that we hope can lift all of those communities together.

And our rationale for focusing on business is that we saw in the equality indicators that business ownership in our community has dropped to less than half of its 2018 percentage, and that same trend is not being seen in other communities in the same time period.

As the daughter of an immigrant who grew up sleeping on bags of flour in the donut shop, I know that restaurants and businesses and markets are really significant places of belonging and gathering and cultural ambassadorship for our community when people think of Asian who are not in our community, they often think of our businesses, and to know that they are suffering uh feels really important for us to focus on.

And right now we've seen initially just at a cursory glance that they're not culturally relevant or bilingual events catered to business owners in our community, and because we think this trend is right now unique to our community, we want to make sure that there's services catered to that as well.

And because it's our role not to directly fix that, but to be an advisory body to the mayor, the city council, and city officials, and because our city has an entire entity partner tool so that is geared towards supporting the economic vitality of our community.

And because our city has an entire entity partner Tulsa that is geared towards supporting the economic vitality of our community, we think this is somewhere we're really well positioned to serve.

So if you go to the back of that first page, our guiding question for this year is to really discover what has contributed to the decrease in business ownership in our community since 2018, actually, not well, 2021 when it began to decrease.

And also what does our business community need to thrive so we can elevate those trends?

And my proposal is borrowed from the women's commission, who has kind of pioneered this idea of a unit of study and focusing our learning so that at the very least our hour a month that we share here at the city can be to generate and elevate the voices of our community and the knowledge we need to tackle this together.

Some of the enabling decisions that we talked about in August for us to be able to focus on one thing are that unfortunately we do have to not focus on some other things.

So a couple projects we're exploring right now are finding a community entity to hand off Tulsa Asia Fest and also a community entity to hand off the Luminary Award student scholarship.

And we're really excited because again, we're an advisory body, and if we can incubate some of these things to go on and live in the community, that is the dream ultimately.

So we're excited to explore those pathways.

And in terms of what that means we can focus on, our year at a glance will be spent answering this question in three broad phases that I have very broadly mapped, because I imagine as we learn more, we might need to adjust where we're headed.

Um but we'll start with listening and mapping, figuring out who are the Asian-owned businesses in nonprofits in Tulsa, what do we know about their current reality, and what's the data tell us about where they stand relative to others?