Meet our 2024 Chinatown Champions: Lauren Chan and Alan Chin!
Our Chinatown Champion Award celebrates individuals whose work, leadership, and creativity have significantly contributed to the vibrancy, resilience, and cultural preservation and amplification of Chinatown. In 2022, we honored our first ever Champions, Grace Young and Jeff Staple. Now, we’re so excited to introduce our 2024 Champs, Lauren Chan + Alan Chin!
Lauren and Alan were honored at Welcome to Chinatown’s Gala last month:
Meet Alan Chin
Alan, a photojournalist and Adjunct Professor at the New School and Columbia University, was born and raised in New York City's Chinatown. Since 1996, he has documented global events and his work is featured at the Museum of Modern Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his Kosovo coverage, Alan is also a 2020 and 2022 Magnum Foundation grantee.
Alan has been along our Welcome to Chinatown journey since the very beginning , first meeting him when he was on assignment with the Wall Street Journal in May 2020 covering Chinatown’s impact in the midst of COVID-19.
For decades, Alan has long committed to documenting and highlighting Chinatown and Asians across the U.S. and world. His careful eye behind the lens and empathic storytelling drives us to think critically about the needs of our community and to listen to their voices and stories. We’re proud to support Alan in his current project documenting and digitally archiving Chinese families across the U.S.
Meet Lauren Chan
A model, entrepreneur, and size-inclusion advocate, she started as a fashion writer with work in Vogue and the New York Times' T Magazine. As Glamour's fashion features editor, she launched the magazine's plus-size style vertical. She founded Henning, a luxury plus-size brand now acquired by Universal Standard. Passionate about size inclusion, mental health, and women's entrepreneurship, she was recently honored in Marie Claire’s 2023 Power List.
A “slide into DMs” story For Good. WtC reached out to Lauren over Instagram, asking for her support to amplify our Longevity Fund fundraiser back in 2020. What started as a small seed of connection with Lauren has grown into an exploration and celebration together of AAPI identities. Lauren is a steward of positive change, using her influential platform to advocate for many of the core tenets that make up Welcome to Chinatown -- innovation, entrepreneurship and AAPI intersectional identities.
Lauren continues to support Welcome to Chinatown through various fundraising initiatives and bridging connections between her world of culture and lifestyle with ours in community enrichment, and we had the pleasure to host a recent dinner with her at Golden Diner, sponsored by Banana Republic, to raise funds and awareness for Welcome to Chinatown and AAPI communities.
