SAN FRANCISCO, April 28 (Xinhua) -- A grand charity night was held Sunday in the San Francisco Bay Area to celebrate World Dance Day with a special theme on poverty alleviation and education for kids from a remote mountainous village in southwestern China.
The 2019 AHSA World Dance Day Charity Night, sponsored by the Asian Hustle and Salsa Association (AHSA) World, a California-based nonprofit organization dedicated to skills development, literacy promotion and poverty alleviation, was staged in Newark city, Northern California, to mark World Dance Day, which falls on April 29.
This year's celebration gave special attention to poverty alleviation and assistance to grant quality education to ethnic Tibetan children in a poverty-stricken village in Pingwu County, a remote mountainous area in Sichuan Province, southwestern China.
The event, centering around the 2019 theme of helping under-privileged kids get out of poverty-hit mountainous areas for new challenges, is a key part of the poverty relief program, "When Dreativity Meets Poverty Alleviation and Education," which was nominated by AHSA World in 2008 and included on the agenda of the fourth UN Sustainable Development Goal for Education 2030, or SDG4-Education 2030.
"Dreativity," a neologism derived from "dance" and "creativity," underscores dance as a tool for creativity in combination with the goal of poverty relief and quality education for the needy, said Hwa A. Lim, a board member of AHSA World, who is also a bioinformatics expert at the UN Food and Agricultural Organization.
"Today's event is the fourth year in a row since we started the endeavor in 2016, and as the (sustainable) goals of the United Nations over the years became better and clearer, we could do a lot better work and preparation," Lim said prior to the night gala Sunday.
Alan Nagy, mayor of Newark city in Alameda County, California, told Xinhua it's a pleasure to be the host city for the event. "The creed or the model of this organization is to think globally and act locally. And the programs like these really aid world understanding and understanding between communities and different nations," he said.
Nagy said that combining charity with the Dance Day is unusual, and there are many different ways that "people can be active on work together and it all makes for better community and better for world understanding."
Under AHSA World's charity program, six ethnic Tibetan kids from southwestern China were brought to the United States on their first overseas trip in their life to widen their horizons in a totally new and different world.
The Tibetan kids will be given a tour to Stanford University in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, and hi-tech companies like Apple in the hub of the U.S. tech innovation Monday.
"We are pleased to give opportunities to those ethnic Tibetan young people to help them come out of the mountains to see the wonderful outside world," said Carmelita Chao, president of AHSA World.
Sunday's charity gala featured "Yak Dance," a traditional ritual dance performed by the six ethnic Tibetan kids to demonstrate from their unique perspective the folk art popular among ethnic Tibetan groups in Sichuan Province. The special dancing art is hailed as a Chinese intangible heritage.
Singers from Hollywood Meiyue Music Studio from Los Angeles also gave a show at the event by singing the famous song We Are the World, which struck home the goal of AHSA World to reach out for those who are struggling in poverty.
The studio donated 100,000 U.S. dollars at the gala to AHSA World to assist it in its future charity programs.
