At the end of each year, our thoughts naturally turn to the future—not just the next 12 months, but the generations to come. With that in mind, in 2022, CAAM has set our sights on new audiences: younger people and people who aren’t already familiar with our legacy of uplifting Asian American stories. Over the past year, we’ve made a conscious effort to engage more deeply with parts of our community that aren’t already aware about our programs.
With the help of the respected journalism think tank Poynter Institute, CAAM is expanding our social media engagement, particularly in the short video formats most popular with Gen Z. We’ve grown our Instagram following, working with partners such as WORLD Channel and PBS to post reels, and we’ve even created a TikTok account where we are bringing behind the scenes peeks at the lives of CAAM staffers and also sharing some of our archival footage from documentaries and our Memories to Light cache of Asian American home movies.
We are also engaging with youth offline. During CAAMFest, we worked alongside Bay Area teens sourced from the Japanese Community Youth Council, who had the opportunity to learn about the intersections of storytelling, visual media, music, and culture while also interviewing the musician Kiyomi before her performance at Yerba Buena Gardens. And throughout the year, CAAM co-presented many film screenings, giving our members and followers the opportunity to attend special presentations of acclaimed films including the awards-nominated Everything Everywhere All at Once and 38 at the Garden, a retrospective on the season of Linsanity. These are just some examples of the ways that the Center for Asian American Media is drawing upon our 40-plus year legacy of bringing our stories to light and will continue to do so in new and engaging ways.
Check out our other posts in this series reflecting on CAAM’s achievements in 2022 and make sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok to be the first to learn about events and opportunities.
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