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AM: I'd like to talk about ACLF. I was one of the founding board members and I served for about, I think, twelve years, that seems to be my duration. That I led some focus groups at the University of Washington with current students, just seeing and taking the temperature of what would be interesting to them, what would appeal to them so that they would participate. The whole basis of ACLF is community based leadership. There were other Asian American leadership programs, but they were corporate, or they were very white in their orientation. He wanted to be Asian American and community based leadership. So, JACL actually benefited from that, we had a whole crop of JACL presidents that came out of ACLF. So I'd say, seven or eight, maybe even more. But as we were making that transition from Sansei -- from Nisei to Yonsei leadership, the people coming out of the ACLF and graduating from that program became our presidents. So Tatsuo, Kyle, just a whole bunch, Don. There were just many, many leaders of the Seattle chapter JACL that came from ACLF. One of the things that Kip really didn't want to lose with all the experiences the Sansei had, that they had to learn the hard way just through experience, through just getting knocked around, he wanted to save the next generation some of those hard lessons and that's one of the reasons why he created ACLF. We're going to do ACLF 102, or 201, to do political leadership, but we started with community based leadership for most of the social services. That's sort of where we began. And we talked a lot later on about having a 201, taking the graduates and then helping them be political, because after all, everything's political. So yeah, and by the way, the JACL Seattle chapter gave some of the seed money to start that first cohort group.

BL: And I just wanted to... oh, I'm sorry.

JD: I just, one more thing on ACLF. I just remember Kip pitching the board at one of our board meetings for his idea for $10,000 to seed ACLF, so many, many years ago. And he shared his concern about the future of our community and the need to have a vehicle to grow new leadership and nurture that leadership for the next generation.

BL: Yeah, I just wanted to underscore what you've said, I mean, ACLF was based on building strength in the community, making the network stronger between generations across different API groups. And I think, just as, maybe the most important was the mentoring aspect. It was set up that way so that each new ACLF member was assigned a mentor who was probably older and doing something in the community that was of interest to the person in the new class, and those are things that he practiced, those are values of his. And Sharon, you've talked a lot about it. He was very much a big picture guy. He depended on people to fill in a lot of the little details, but he had great vision and great ideas, and really would seek out help and support from people who were good with details. Yeah, that's sort of who he was as a leader. He was not a detail person, which is why I think we got along because I'm very much a detail oriented person, or at least in my younger days, I was. [Laughs] You get older and you start forgetting things. Yeah.

AM: Part of that community strengthening was taking each ACLF cohort to Bush. It was almost a requirement. You had to go to Bush after our training sessions. And again, they would go to Bush and they would meet people and yeah, just built community. And we all know, JACL, the real decisions were always made after the meetings at Bush.

BT: And still are. [Laughs]

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2022 Seattle Chapter JACL. All Rights Reserved.