ABOUT CISANI

CISANI HISTORY:

In 1979 three community leaders - Po Wong in San Francisco, Charles Wang in New York City, and Bernarda Wong in Chicago - sought to reach out to their counterparts and learn more about the services they provided to the Chinese community in their area. They felt brining together a focused group of organizations serving Chinese immigrants would be extremely helpful.

This group of leaders met together for the first time in San Francisco when Po Wong offered to hold the first conference in 1980. The conference of the newly created group - the Chinese Immigrant Service Agencies of North America (CISANA) - was a success, and was noted in the Congressional REcord. Many agencies from the west coast and contacts from Vancouver and Hong Knog joined the conference. The founders of CISANA each had different goals - networking, organizational development, and increased participation - and it was apparent that all of these issues and more affected each attendee.

Those who attended subsequent conferences understood bringing together organizations with similar goals and services was vital in developing similar programming in their own agency. Ideas gleaned from yearly conferences and follow up spawned new initiatives across the country. Membership in the organization blossomed, and agencies from around the world became active participants. CISANA - renamed the Chinese Immigrant Service Agencies Network International (CISANI) - and grown to become a truly international network.

CISANI meets each year at a different site and on a specific topic, coming together with conference themes including 'Organizational Development', 'Immigrant Rights', 'Reinventing Human Services', 'The Changing Chinese Family', and more. Today, CISANI is as vital to the development of programming that meets community needs as it was in 1979. As it was in the beginning, the strength of CISANI lies in its member agencies, which share their visions and successes so that others may also benefit.