Colorado Asian Pacific Youth Association - Capya - Overview

Colorado Asian Pacific Youth Association began when we saw an opportunity to you give back to our youth, to give back to your community. We wanted to create a safe space for our students. Our vision at the end of the day is to..hopefully empower our students. CAPYA is..a home that we've created. We want our students to feel welcome. We want our students to really interact with each other and share ideas.. ..share what it is to be an Asian Pacific American. It's a place for us to educate students and a way that they are able to be ready for college life and any future opportunities that they'll have. In my eyes, CAPYA is like another family. I am a part of an association of people who have similar backgrounds. Some of us come from different schools that don't have that diversity that we kind of need to grow up with and to learn from. We come here, we're comfortable with each, we learn from each other. It's a place where I can express myself freely. I think CAPYA..CAPYA gives a really great sense of community. The best memory about, well ever since joining CAPYA has been everything. My best memory in CAPYA would definitely be when we were at summer retreat. Getting to meet people that he wouldn't have met if he weren't in this together. I don't know, just meeting people and spending the day with them was really fun. You get to work with all of these students and you get to basically just be a part the program and put your work into it. The purpose of retreat is to create a setting for Asian Pacific American students to interact with each other which in a setting that are not familiar with. So at retreat, we do a lot of team development small group activities and offer workshops on leadership development and interact with community members that we bring out. Being put in a leadership position, it really allows me to work on that and I've learned a lot through my experiences as a student. Since joining CAPYA, I think I'm a little more outspoken. I think I've been able to make more friends..easier to be social. I feel like CAPYA has made me into more of an open-minded person. That gave us a lot of courage and we're more confident and outgoing. We were both like pretty shy before joining CAPYA. It gave me my passion towards leadership, towards helping my community in general. The reason I believe in CAPYA is because I want to share the experience I had growing up as an Asian American youth in Colorado. There's always a part of me that's wanting to give back in some way, shape, or form. We want our students to know that their community, especially the Asian Pacific American community is a strong one and it's a developing one in Colorado. One word that describes CAPYA? Passion! Diversity! Spontaneous. Opportunistic. Influential. Community. Legend...wait for it.. ..Dary... Lengendary! My hope for out students at the end of the day is for them to really know that they're not alone. There's a supportive network out there for them and hopefully CAPYA is one of those spaces that they can call their home and a place that they can always go to, to have community and to share their stories with others.