Third Thursdays

TEAM

The Third Thursdays team has fun planning the TT calendar over dinner. If you come to one of our organizers meetings or events, you'll probably see some of these wonderful people. Thanks everyone! We're adding bios as soon as they finish them!

Current Organizers

Eric Chang

A budding novelist and community organizer, Eric still manages to cough up the time to work as a full-time realtor with RE/MAX Today. Eric applies much of his hard-earned cash to finance his addiction to gourmet cookware. When he’s not in the kitchen, he can be found helping out other Bay Area organizations including: Third Thursdays Community Forum, Asian Pacific Psychological Services, Mental Health Task Force Chin Jurn Wor Ping, Stop Chinatown Evictions Committee

Steven Chen*

A Bay Area native and Taiwanese American, Steven is a Family physician at Asian Health Services, a community health center in Oakland Chinatown . An aspiring polyglot, he wants to better serve the health care needs of underserved communities. To this end, he is currently completing a Fellowship in Integrative Medicine while also organizing the North American Taiwanese Medical Association 2G. Past community involvement includes fighting for ethnic studies, and co-founding the Public Service Medical Scholars Program at Stanford Medical School. An avid snowboarder, he also enjoys listening to Spanish radio.

Willard Chin

Gary Chou

Gary Chou runs manja.org, a website promoting Asian American arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the past 5 years he's worked with several Bay Area Asian American arts and community organizations in a variety of capacities: organizer, curator, facilitator, and volunteer. In his free time, he enjoys making pictures, eating sushi, and exploring ways to support emerging artists.

Gavin Funabiki*

Gavin Funabiki had experience in the philanthropic and social enterprise worlds before becoming a applications developer for a national law firm. He's very interested education, housing and Asian and Pacific Islander community issues. He climbs rocks, eats food, and trys to avoid getting trapped in traffic, long lines, etc.

Susan Hsieh

Iris Kong

Karen Koh

Karen is a Culturally Competent Health Care Consultant at Kaiser Permanente and working on her doctoral thesis which focuses on the impact of leadership on sustaining culturally competent health care programs. Her passion for advocacy work in the Asian community stemmed from her previous work experience at Asian Health Services and Asian Pacific Psychological Services in Oakland. In her spare time, she enjoys volunteering for Third Thursdays/Asian Americans for Community Outreach/Linkages/hAPI Hour, dancing, karaoke, rock climbing, volleyball, and spending time with her cute beagle Belle.

Thien Nguyen-Trung

Shelley Tadaki*

Shelley started her work in the nonprofit field as a Program Associate, running scholarship programs for a Community Foundation in SF and made a change after grad school to become a student affairs professional in higher education. She has a strong interest in education policy, leadership development, and organizational culture & behavior. Her random hobbies include keeping a list of unique Chinese American boy names (like Kermit, Elvis, and Hoover) and living up to the stereotype of the Asian tourist by taking pictures of everything with her digital camera.

Ben Schweng

Sinclair Wu

A native of Illinois, Sinclair has now lost his cold weather endurance after so many years in California. He is involved with various non-profits in the U.S. and hopes to help bring together the wealth of knowledge and experience of organizations on both sides of the Pacific. In his spare time, Sinclair hunts for new Shanghai dumpling restaurants, thinks about playing tennis and getting into shape, and volunteers as an SAT teacher for underprivileged youth in San Francisco.

Irene Wan

Megan Yee

Erick Young

Erick has volunteered with several Asian American community organizations including Asian Americans for Community Outreach and a stint as a Board member for M Society West. During the day (and night) he works for The Man doing IT consulting work at a Fortune 100 company and is also currently trying to earn a degree from Stanford University. When he's not filling his brain with random information, you may find him out searching for tasty ramen and curry.

On Hiatus

Linda Huang

Derek Kim

Will Poon

Alumni/ae

Stephanie Choi

Sharon Dang

Andrew Jhun

Jane Kim*

Ben King

Ben Lin

Bianca Ling

Jason Liu*

Cari Pang*

Julius Paras*

Bill Shen*

Thomas Wei

* founder

posted 5/31/2006