EPIC hosted its third annual Lunar New Year celebration on Feb. 12 featuring student activities, performances and food.
The event included activities for students to create their own variety of ornaments that were representative of the Lunar New Year. The ornament designs were trees and lanterns.
After the students have completed creating their ornaments they were given a stamp and were given food for participating in the celebration. This year’s celebration was the biggest one to date, according to attendees.
“Previous events weren’t as big. I’m going to compare it to last year’s Lunar New Years, there’s a difference between the attendees. We always strive for more people to participate. From last year to this year, I would say this has been one of the biggest events,”said Mikyla Cargo, one of the volunteers with EPIC.
There were a variety of performances for the students to enjoy with a new addition of lion dancers this year.
“This year we have dancers, and we’re just hoping that every single year, it just gets bigger. We bring in more communities to showcase our students, and to show them what type of different groups and communities celebrate Lunar New Year,” said EPIC Director Susan Vang.
Students from all backgrounds attended the events.
“I saw the event and was interested in all the activities. I would always like to learn more about other cultures because for me, when someone asks me about my culture, I’m really honored about that. So I think an opportunity to learn about someone else’s is really good,” said attendee Joshua Martinez Leva. “I saw the dancers, and I really like the way they dress and the way well, obviously, they dance.”
Despite the efforts of the Trump administration cutting funding to programs that are under the blanket of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), the event was not impacted by cuts.
“The budget that we utilize for this event comes from the state. So it’s a different stream of money,” said Vang. The cuts, however, are still affecting EPIC’s allocations of funds.
“We just have to watch out, now that the budget for EPIC itself has been cut. We just have to make sure that a lot of our programs are streamlined with learning outcomes that we want for our students, to learn about our culture and the communities. EPIC within itself, we had to cut down on some events, but I would say for this bigger amount, we know that it’s a big event that we want to hold annually. So we did save the budget for this already. So I would say not really, but we just have to be more conscious, ” said Vang.
There are misconceptions on which communities celebrate the Lunar New Year.
“I think a lot of people think, lunar new year is just the Chinese new year. It’s not, there’s a lot of people who celebrate Lunar New Year. You’ll see different folks out here wearing different attires because they’re from different communities, who all celebrate Lunar New Year,” said Vang.
The district also celebrated the Lunar New Year holiday on Tuesday, Feb. 17. Campus was closed for the occasion.
