It’s still finding its legs, but the Asian American Chamber of Commerce
It’s still finding its legs, but the Asian American Chamber of Commerce in St. Louis has been ramping up since it formed in 2011.
One of the initial driving forces behind its creation was the excitement about establishing a Chinese cargo hub at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.
While those plans have since fizzled, the chamber has not.
Led by Alexander Lee, a Chinese-American lawyer, the group will host monthly breakfast and networking events starting this month. The topics will run the gamut from how businesses can protect themselves from fraud to finding a lawyer to what kinds of insurance businesses should have.
The group, which has about 200 people on its email list, has an office space at 1766 Burns Avenue, next door to the St. Louis Chinese American News, in Overland.
The chamber is working to spruce up the office, and it has already gotten some help with furniture from Monsanto Co., Lee said.
“We are looking to utilize the space better,” he said. “It’s an ongoing effort to get the office set up so it can be more of a resource for the community overall.”
For now, the group is an all-volunteer effort. But the chamber recently took an intern on board from Washington University’s business school. The intern is helping with everything from sending emails to marketing to building the website, Lee said.
As the chamber continues to work on building its membership base and develop relationships with the community, Lee said it has sought category_idance from the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which has been around longer.
“Those folks have been very generous with their time,” he said. “We see them sort of as a big brother type organization.”
Lee recently sat down with the Post-Dispatch to talk about the chamber. Here is an edited transcript of that interview:
How did you get involved with this group?
Another gentleman, an attorney by the name of Johnny Wang, and I were both heavily involved with the Missouri Asian American Bar Association. I was a former president, and he is now a former president of the organization. And so we got involved because we were really interested in the Missouri-China hub commission and all of the efforts they were using to try to get the cargo hub here established.
While we were doing that, we got in touch and started to work together with the other Asian organizations here in town — the Organization of Chinese Americans, St. Louis Modern Chinese School and all of the other different groups. Throughout that process, we thought, “Wow, there isn’t really a sort of umbrella organization for all of the Asian ethnicities and groups. There are so many different organizations trying to do good work. Why not try to do more of that work together?”
When we started doing some more research across the nation, we realized that St. Louis was one of the few cities that didn’t have (an Asian American Chamber of Commerce). Kansas City has had one since the ‘90s.
What have some of the challenges been in forming this new group?
There have been lots; there’s no two ways about it. Anytime you’re trying to build something from the ground up, there are a lot of challenges starting with the basic administration. Everybody is all volunteer with the exception of our intern. So you’ve got folks who have very busy professional lives and personal lives and trying to get everybody on the same page to meet and drive goals and all of that is a time-based challenge.
Beyond that, I would say that another challenge has been just trying to get the word out in terms of reaching out to the historically established organizations and letting them know: Hey, we’re here to help overall. We’re not trying to replace any organization out there. We want to enhance all of the organizations out there and hopefully develop more interactions and cooperation between different groups so everyone can work toward big, good common goals that we all have.
What are some of your major projects?
One is a continuation of what we did last year. We put together an Asian heritage festival last year in October, which was a great success. We had a bunch of the different Asian businesses together for a day-long festival with food and entertainment. Having grown up here in St. Louis, I haven’t seen anything before quite like that. … So we’re hoping to make that bigger and better this year. Tentatively, we have it set for Sept. 7 of this year.
There’s another program we hope to launch which will be a day-long seminar. It will be a seminar on doing business in Asia. I think there’s a lot of interest in that.
What are some of the major industries and unique niches encompassed by Asian-American business in St. Louis?
It’s a wide range. It’s everything from your mom-and-pop restaurant and Laundromat up to large manufacturing operations like Max Tsai with Bailey International, which has facilities in Southern Illinois. … You’ve got IT consulting companies. You’ve got folks who are in the hotel and hospitality industry. There’s a great Indian organization that does a lot on the hospitality and hotel industry here in St. Louis. And then you’ve obviously got all of the professionals who are in everything from medicine to IT to law. So it’s diverse.
What are some of the major challenges that Asian-American business owners face in this region?
As I see it, in a lot of cases — I think this is the case with a lot of different immigrant communities — you want to try to do it all on your own. I think that’s a good attitude with that American, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. But there’s a set of resources we have in St. Louis that they can reach out to such as business counseling and different resources that they could be taking advantage to take their business to the next level. I think that it’s our hope we provide that awareness to those business to let them know what they can take advantage of to help themselves.
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