The mission statement has been sitting as it is for the past 2 months. We're going to talk about how to revise it, if necessary this morning.

The original mission statement came out of two online chats.

Sophia had mentioned an aspect of community that should be integrated into the mission statement. Growth is not necessarily just a personal thing, but also in a collective sense between community. The difficulty lies in balancing and including the idea that one should be able to either participate in their local community(s), or to impact the larger society in the mission vision. It was fixed by addressing the 'young adult Taiwanese American community' instead of putting it at the end.

'Purposeful' as a word works, instead of 'meaningful', because people at this age, can admit to having a purposeless life as opposed to a meaningless life. So it doesn't imply that people had meaningless lives before they came to TAF college program.

We kept 'adult' in there because young Taiwanese Americans community is too broad and might be interpreted to encompass the 2nd generation TA, as opposed to just saw

Thus, at this point, we have:

The mission of the TAF College Program is to guide the young adult Taiwanese American community in leading purposeful lives by challenging them to think critically about their life paths and empowering them to make meaningful contributions to society

We have a problem with the first 'them' after addressing the community, in 'challenging them'. We decided on the word 'individual' to addresses the grammar problem in number agreement between 'community' and 'them', and it addresses the fact that we're interested in the life paths of each person. But then we went back on it and decided that sounded funny, so we went back to 'them', and the person that had a problem with it the first place conceded.

We then just had an incredible amount of forking in the mission statement in choice of words, and meaning, and personal preference in what things sounded funny. We're going to write down a couple versions, and table it until later.