MOST OUTSTANDING CULTURAL PROGRAM NOMINEE
Ole Miss Vietnamese American Student Association
Pho Night
Provide a detailed description of the event and the population it served. Details MUST include: date of event, number of participants, program purpose (goals, objectives, etc.) and use of resources (finances, community support, etc.).
On February 26th, Ole VASA organized its very first Pho Night with financial support from Grove Grocery, the University of Mississippi’s food pantry. We had numerous objectives for this event, a primary one being to honor our Vietnamese heritage. Since this was an Ole VASA event, we strived to share our culture with the entire Oxford community by celebrating the Lunar New Year and providing pho, free of charge, to everyone in attendance.
To achieve this aforementioned goal, we utilized several resources to obtain all of the pho ingredients, event decor, and prizes for activities - our E-Board members met frequently and communicated effectively to make certain that we had everything we needed. As for marketing techniques, we shared our event graphic to many outlets, including social media, GroupMe, and the Ole Miss ForUM.
All in all, our Pho Night was a success. We offered both pho and bầu cua to all of our guests as a means of cultural enrichment. Since we opened the event to the general public, we had approximately 100 attendees, some of whom being members from other VSAs in the region. Undoubtedly, this event brought great attention and publicity to Ole VASA, and the assistant editor of the Daily Mississippian newspaper even published an article about the event. For this reason, Pho Night received the “Best Cultural Event” award from Ole Miss, effectively meeting the mission and goal of Ole VASA.
What efforts were used to motivate and involve the organization's members?
Pho Night served the Oxford community as a means of cultural enrichment. Despite having a notable Vietnamese population, Ole Miss as a whole is still young in terms of having knowledge about our culture. For this reason, we exposed our guests to many Vietnamese traditions: celebrating Lunar New Year, eating the country’s national dish of pho, and playing bầu cua & traditional Vietnamese music.
Did the organization overcome any challenges that arose while planning and implementing the cultural program/event? How?
While planning and implementing the event, we encountered a plethora of challenges that we did not expect. The first challenge was deciding where to get all the ingredients since there weren’t many restaurants in Oxford that sold pho. There were, of course, many ideas that we approached: (1) see if either of the two restaurants in Oxford would source us, (2) find a restaurant in Memphis, or (3) utilize the restaurant owned by the family of our co-sports coordinator Thai Lam. In the end, we decided to go with Thai’s restaurants because it would save us the hassle of back-and-forth communication with others and Thai could easily coordinate with his family.
The next challenge we encountered was the cost of the event. Since Thai’s restaurant is five hours away from Oxford, the reimbursement for gas would’ve been considerable. Furthermore, when Thai gave us a rough estimate of the food costs, we soon realized that we’d be going over our budget for the event. Thankfully, the director of Grove Grocery and our internal vice president Tina Truong offered to fund us under the stipulation that we’d further the pantry’s mission. A challenge that followed was coordinating the times to pick up the food from the restaurant, but it was gracefully handled by Thai and our co-president Tristan Tran.
The final challenges occurred while Pho Night took place. It took a fair amount of time to prep the ingredients and reheat the pho broth, but our attendees were kept busy with our activities and games. We were concerned with having enough time to set up, host the event, and clean up, so we decided to buy an extra hour at the venue, which proved to be useful in the end.