Back to the beginning

by Jen Chau, originally published at The Time is Always Right

A friend recently asked me about the beginning of Swirl.

I told her how I started it. And why. She interrupted to clarify – she wanted to know how I felt. What specifically I was experiencing when I came up with the idea, when I took the first steps to incorporate, when it all came to fruition. I had to think about this – after all, it was nearly eleven years ago.

And there wasn’t one feeling, but a pretty good mix of many emotions from the time the idea started to form in my mind, through the very first year of Swirl’s existence.

Hopeful – as I sat down at one of the big wooden tables in the Center for Work and Service on Wellesley College’s campus in April of 1999. The whole world ahead of me as I looked for my first job after college. I knew I wanted to work at an organization that served multiracial people and families.

Confused and disheartened – about ten minutes into my research at the Center for Work and Service as I realized there were no mixed race organizations in New York City to which I could apply and beg for a job.

Curious – as I told one of my closest friends, Nadiyah, that there weren’t any mixed orgs for me to work at, and mulling over her nonchalant, perfect response: “Just start one yourself.”

Scared but determined – when I started to take little step by little step to research and then set up Swirl as an official organization. I was nervous. I knew how to set up organizations at Wellesley, but here in the real world? It felt big and foreign. But I knew that what I was doing was needed. And wanted. I also knew that I couldn’t use the same tactics I used at Wellesley (wink, for those who know what I’m talkin’ about!), so I was determined to figure out this new terrain.

Energized – looking around the table at the first Swirl meeting and seeing a few people grow to about twenty by the time we were ready to begin that afternoon. Twenty people agreeing to be a part of helping to start up New York City’s only multiracial organization in support of mixed individuals, interracial couples, and mixed families. I was so energized that I started to work on Swirl during the evenings and weekends when I wasn’t at my full-time job, helping to prepare homeless men and women for full-time jobs at a welfare-to-work program.

Validated and seen – Admittedly, Swirl also helped me to feel seen in a way that I never had, growing up multiracial myself. For once, I had a community to which I could turn. People who understood me. Others to whom I could relate and with whom I would feel safe. Wrapped up in my hope to build community for others, was my own need to feel a sense of belonging. I knew first-hand how important this was, and what it meant not to have this kind of connection. Community seemed to be something others sometimes took for granted if they had one in which they were fully accepted. Maybe even two. Growing up in the generation in which I grew up, it was common to “have the best of both worlds” (as others called it) yet not feel a part of either. Swirl was for just these people – those who were not fully accepted because they were not enough of any, and too much for the simple check boxes we came to depend upon as a society.

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