Event Diaries: 2026 RepresentAsian Matters Summer Program - Rooted in Joy
For one week in July, the Denver Botanic Gardens got louder. Not disruptive-loud. Joy-loud!
Bursts of laughter cutting across the garden. Overlapping conversations at every lunch table. Middle schoolers pressing their faces to a classroom window because their camp guides stepped out to eat and they missed them after ten minutes. Ten minutes!
This was RepresentAsian Matters 2026, Asian Girls Ignite's sixth annual summer program for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) girls and gender-expansive youth in grades 6-9. The theme was Rooted in Joy, and we mean that literally! We spent five days asking what joy actually is: where it lives, who it connects us to, and what it makes possible.
Here's what happened, what our students built together, and why a week like this does work that lasts far longer than just the summer.
A week like this also doesn't happen alone. Thank you to the Colorado Health Foundation for sponsoring this year's summer program, and to the Denver Botanic Gardens for sponsoring our venue for the fourth year in a row and giving our students a whole garden where they could celebrate their identity loud and proud.
A Week Built Around Joy, On Purpose
Joy does serious work in positive youth development. AANHPI youth spend a lot of the year navigating scripts other people wrote for them, and the pressure to perform without struggling shows up in devastating ways. Suicide is now the leading cause of death for AANHPI youth ages 15 to 24 (CDC, 2021), and rates have doubled in the past decade. Youth programming where these students get to be fully, loudly themselves is a direct answer to that.
Joy is a practice, and it takes more courage than it gets credit for.
Being silly in front of people you just met is a risk. Following your curiosity into something new is a risk.
So this year's summer program was designed to make those risks feel worth taking! Students practiced noticing the small moments and saying thank you for them out loud. They let themselves feel happy with other people instead of managing it quietly on their own. They expressed joy the way it actually comes out of them, whether that was loud, weird, soft, or all of the above.
Each day explored joy through a different question:
Monday - Connection: How does joy connect me to others and myself?
Tuesday - Creativity: How are grief and joy interconnected, and how does creativity deepen our understanding of that relationship?
Wednesday - Celebration: How can celebrating our joy become a daily practice?
Thursday - Curiosity: How can trusting our intuition and being present guide us to joy?
Friday - Community: How does it feel to be part of a community rooted in shared values and lived experiences?
Every activity, from making art collages to a soundbath, hung on one of these questions. That's the social-emotional learning happening underneath the scrap paper and the boba: students practicing reflection, naming what they feel, and trusting their voice in a room that celebrates their identity.
How the week worked
First, the structure everything else ran on: students spent the week in small groups, each led by one of our six high school camp guides. These are Asian Girls Ignite students themselves, just a few years ahead, who applied, trained, and prepared for months to lead this week. Small groups were each student's home base, and camp guides were the ones who knew their names by day one, noticed what they needed, and kept the week feeling steady. More on them soon!
It started with a scavenger hunt
We could have opened with a presentation about Asian Girls Ignite. Instead, students spent Monday morning hunting through the Botanic Gardens in small groups, solving riddles and puzzles to piece together our story themselves. Volunteers from our Lotus Collective, the intergenerational community of AANHPI women and gender-expansive adults who show up for our students, were stationed throughout the gardens holding the clues. To earn each one, groups had to complete a small photo challenge together, like figuring out how to take a group photo in the shape of a star.
Having Lotus Collective volunteers hold the clues was deliberate. While students hunted for answers about Asian Girls Ignite, they were also meeting the adults in their community face to face on day one, and intergenerational connection got a face too: someone standing by the lilies with a crossword puzzle, waiting to meet them. And the prize for a finished worksheet? Boba from Die Die Must Try, which, if you know AANHPI youth (okay maybe us adults too 😆), might be the most motivating force on earth.
Students wrote the rules of their own community
Before anything else on Monday, each small group drafted community agreements: what they needed from each other to feel like they belonged, and what they agreed to offer in return. Then the whole group of 30-plus students synthesized those into shared agreements for the week, signed them, and held each other to them.
Those agreements held all week. Students told us at the end of the week that they were part of why they felt so comfortable, and it makes sense: they wrote the rules themselves, so they trusted them.
Storytellers anchored every afternoon
Each afternoon, students met AANHPI women and gender-expansive storytellers who shared their lives and led a hands-on activity tied to the day's question. 👉 To learn more about all of the storytellers, click here!
Joy and grief mural with Madalyn and Helen
Artist and advocate Madalyn Drewno (she/her) and Huệ Helen Nguyễn (she/her), caregiver of plants and people, led students in creating a community mural about how joy and grief coexist, in each of our lives and in the world we share. The session opened with the line that framed the whole afternoon: "micro joys are how we survive macro griefs." Small groups reflected on how both feelings show up in their own lives, then drew those reflections onto one shared mural, with Madalyn and Helen drawing right alongside them. Helen added a ladybug for her grandmother and people singing together in a rice field, and students filled in the rest.
At closing circle that afternoon, students shared how they'll honor both feelings, in their own words:
"Grief is a loss of the people who have given me a lot of joy"
"Allow myself to not feel ashamed if i feel joy during grief (or grief during joy)"
"Make art to let myself know how I am feeling"
"Accepting the joy that someone gave me while they are alive"
"You can't have accomplishments without struggles"
Embroidery hoops with Yu Ning
Small business owner and advocate, Yu Ning Chan (she/they) opened with a gallery walk of her own art: protest watercolors, a crochet jellyfish, felted bookmarks, mini embroidery hoops, and patches stitched onto recycled fabric scraps. Students wandered the room noticing and wondering out loud before Yu Ning shared her story. While living with depression, Yu Ning was told by someone to take a photo of one beautiful thing every day. Learning to find beauty in things that aren't usually celebrated, like a blade of grass, a meal, or a stranger, taught her what brings her joy. Students then stitched that same idea into embroidery hoops, each one framing a moment of joy worth keeping.
Asked at closing circle what their own celebration of joy looks like, students kept it simple:
"laughing with the people I love"
"choosing what makes me happy"
"talking about what brings me joy with people who are close to me"
Tea leaves and tea blends with Alex and Christine
And on Thursday, Alex Tran (she/her), audio engineer and diviner, and Christine Young (she/her), herbalist and owner of the cultural shop Hearth and Seoul, split the afternoon into two crafts, and both of their stories started in childhood. Alex learned tea leaf reading from her grandmother, who used it as a way to be curious about how young Alex saw the world. She only realized later that it was an intuition practice, and today it's how she connects with her ancestry and nurtures herself. Christine's childhood curiosity about plants grew into herbalism, then into questions about her own heritage that took her to Korea, and eventually into opening Hearth and Seoul to find out if others were searching for the same thing.
With Alex, small groups practiced reading sample cups themselves before she offered her own interpretations. With Christine, students smelled and tasted their way through her herbs, each one labeled with its own story tag, then blended, named, and bagged a tea of their own to take home. Everyone brewed their new blends at the same time and closed the day drinking together over mochi and choux from Sweet Rice Flour, reading the leaves at the bottom of a tea they made themselves.
One scene from Thursday's tea leaf readings: students weren't always sure what to make of the shapes in their own cups, and Alex took their observations and turned them into something that landed. One student saw a puppy and heard about her own playfulness. Another got a reading about tapping into her creativity that matched her passions so closely she said she felt seen! When our Marketing Designer, Jane Ly (she/her), finally got her own cup, she understood why students had been so quiet over theirs. The reading is personal in a way only you can fully feel.
This year's community art project: joy and grief jars
Every summer, students take part in a community art project, our annual tradition of turning the week's reflections into something you can actually hold. This year's project grew straight out of Tuesday's mural: each small group filled a jar for a specific community partner, packed with origami, bracelets, and handwritten notes of encouragement and thanks. One of the note starters says it best: "In case no one told you today…"
The jars went out to six spaces that hold community across Denver: the Denver Botanic Gardens, Hearth and Seoul, Quince Coffee House, Social Fabric Hub, The Abolition Garden, and Moonshot (fun fact: Asian Girls Ignite was born through the Moonshot Innovation Space!)
Every day closed with collage
Students ended each afternoon in their journals with magazines, dried flowers, gems, and fabric scraps, answering the day's guiding question however they wanted: writing, drawing, or a page of images only they fully understood. By Friday, each student held a five-day record of their own reflection, made by hand. That journal goes home, and hopefully the habit does too: taking a few minutes at the end of a day to notice what brought you joy.
And Friday traded the gardens for the mountains
The last day was community day, and we took it on the road! It wouldn't be summer in Colorado if we didn't head to the mountains! Students bused up to Snow Mountain Ranch for a morning of horseback riding, a first for plenty of them. After a week of practicing curiosity and trusting your gut in a garden, getting up on a horse alongside your whole community is a lesson no classroom can teach.
Time outdoors matters for young people, and access to it is far from a given: 44 percent of Asian communities in the U.S. live in nature-deprived areas, compared with 26 percent of white communities (Center for American Progress, 2026). Days in the mountains are one more way we help the outdoors feel like it belongs to our students, too.
After the morning ride, everyone headed back down to Congress Park, where families joined us for the community picnic that closed out the week. More on that picnic below, because it gave us one of the moments we'll be talking about all year. 🥹
Our high school camp guides
Meet this year’s crew
If you want to see what youth leadership actually looks like at Asian Girls Ignite, this is it! Last summer, four high schoolers stepped up as our first-ever camp guides. This summer, the role became a tradition. Six high school students led this year's crew: Naiya K. (she/her), Elise Y. (she/her), Reina K. (she/her), Eleanor F. (she/they), Emmy J. (she/her), and Jane E. (she/her). 👉 To get to know each camp guide click here! And here's the lineage: Naiya and Elise returned from last year's founding four, while Reina and Emmy, who volunteered as helpers last summer, stepped up into full guide roles this year.
Meanwhile, this year's program assistants (PAs), Akemi (she/it) and Fatima (she/her), supported the whole crew all week in the same role Reina and Emmy started in. Students who came up through our programming keep coming back to lead it for the next group.
Akemi also left her mark on this post itself: some of the photos here are hers. On top of everything the PA role asked of her, she picked up her camera whenever she could. She dreams of becoming a runway photographer and wanted to build her skills and portfolio, and when students tell us what they're working toward, we find ways for them to practice it for real!
The preparation behind the role
This week was months in the making for the guides. Being an Asian Girls Ignite camp guide is a paid role, and they applied and interviewed for it with our Program Coordinator, Annabel Kaey (she/her), back in the winter. In the spring, they trained on how to work with middle schoolers and how to support each other as a team. In May, they spent a full day writing lesson plans, pairing up as week-long partners, reviewing the schedule, and planning their own storyteller session. In June, each camp guide met one-on-one with Annabel to talk through their lesson plans, and in July, everyone walked the gardens together to run through the full schedule before students ever arrived.
Each camp guide also assembled their own group's welcome bags, starting alongside Annabel and finishing at home with personal notes and handmade gifts for every student, including custom sunglasses with each student's name and friendship bracelets.
And they led all week long
On Monday, they kicked off the week as its first storytellers. Each guide brought a personal artifact and gave their own answer to how joy connects them to others. The stories ranged from LEGO dates with friends to speech and debate tournaments, a tennis club, a dive team, an afternoon spent painting with mom, and a beloved sandwich shop from a study abroad in France.
From Tuesday on, camp guide pairs took charge of entire days, leading the activities and transitions that kept the week moving.
Across the week, high schoolers designed and led the mid-morning sparkle sessions, and students signed up for the one they wanted each day. The options ranged from bedazzling anything from their tote bags ("you can't bedazzle your face") to a garden walk at their own pace, rock painting, plant drawing studies, a soundbath with returning energy medicine practitioner Christina Ifurung (she/her) of Kapwa Healing, and a Botanic Gardens bingo that sent pairs racing through the Freyer Newman Center to cross off finds.
Fed by our own community, all week long
Food is never an afterthought at Asian Girls Ignite. Nearly every meal this week came from local and AANHPI-owned businesses across Denver, which meant our students ate well while their community's businesses got the support.
Here's who fed us:
Monday: onigiri and sandos from Onto, Filipino BBQ from Paborito, and boba from Die Die Must Try as the scavenger hunt prize
Tuesday: assorted pastries from Tokyo Premium Bakery and Nepalese momos from Rocky Mountain Momo
Wednesday: smoothie bowls from Bowl Society and Filipino Vegan food for lunch from Kids Table
Thursday: pandesal from Bahala Bakery, Hawaiian BBQ for lunch from No Ke Aloha, and mochi and choux from Sweet Rice Flour
Friday: a build-your-own kimchi nacho and fry bar from Mukja food truck at our community picnic, plus popsicles for a sweet send-off
If you're in Denver and any of these made you hungry, go eat! Tell them Asian Girls Ignite sent you. 😉
The moments we keep coming back to
Every summer leaves us with a few moments that sum up the whole week better than any recap could. Here are this year's:
One small group adopted a One Direction doll (hey Harry!) their camp guide, Jane, brought along and fully initiated him: a yellow lanyard to match their group, name and pronouns included, and a place of honor on the altar during the soundbath so he could participate in Asian Girls Ignite activities accordingly! 😂
Camp guides, Eleanor and Naiya, led a four-corner debate on the prompt "books are better than movies," which sounds simple until a room of middle schoolers starts bringing capitalism, identity, and what artists owe their audiences into the argument. They defended their opinions, and Eleanor and Naiya kept the conversation respectful and moving. Watching two high schoolers guide a whole group through a conversation like that is exactly the kind of leadership this role builds.
At Thursday lunch, students peered through the classroom window to find the camp guides who had stepped out to eat, because ten minutes apart was apparently too long. That's what it looks like when young people attach to mentors who see them.
At Friday's community picnic, where 106 students, families, storytellers, volunteers, and staff gathered at Congress Park, our rising 9th graders reflected on their final year as campers. They named the specific things that made them feel cared for: the snacks tucked into their totes, the community agreements everyone honored, the guides who noticed what each student needed before they had to ask. Small acts of care are what make a week like this stick, and that's exactly how we design it.
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If this recap made you feel something, $10 a month keeps it going. Monthly donors fund the workshop materials, the journals, the food students still remember at the picnic. 👉Become a monthly donor by clicking here!
About Asian Girls Ignite
Founded in October 2020, Asian Girls Ignite is a non-profit organization that provides educational programs for AANHPI girls and gender-expansive youth to celebrate their individual and collective power. We use storytelling to empower the next generation to write their futures in their own voice. Our programs and events nurture social-emotional learning to help our students grow in resilience, empathy, and self-awareness.
About Asian Girls Ignite's Summer Program
RepresentAsian Matters is Asian Girls Ignite's annual summer program for AANHPI girls and gender-expansive youth going into grades 6-9, held each July in Denver, Colorado. Now in its sixth year, the week brings students together with AANHPI storytellers, high school camp guides, and each other for hands-on workshops, daily reflection, and a lot of good food catered by local AANHPI chefs. It's a culturally affirming program built on what the research on positive youth development keeps confirming: a genuine sense of belonging and strong intergenerational relationships are among the most protective factors a young person can have. A meta-analysis of 30 studies found that simply having a caring adult mentor outside the family is linked to better social-emotional and academic outcomes for young people, across every risk level (American Journal of Community Psychology, 2018). For five days, Asian Girls Ignite students are in a community where their cultures and full selves are the norm rather than the footnote, learning alongside adults and near-peers who have lived what they're living. Our co-founders started Asian Girls Ignite because they built the space they wish they had growing up. Every July, we set that table again, and every July, more students pull up a chair.
