” A visit from an old friend Pej from Croatia yesterday reminded me of ManyMindsLink App ten years ago. I would never think that it has grew into MMLink App with such a lot of contents and has helped many people to learn skills.

DAPA has now had six people including two families in Canberra. Soon another member is going to move there. This year we will make another effort to travel there to visit them. We should continue to help more people to travel to spread our work. Last trip to Canberra, we had a party at Uma’s house with 11 of us travelling from Sydney. Uma spent a lot of effort to cater for us. We would like to see Uma setting up a DAPA branch in Canberra when she retires.

This morning in the Macquarie Park Ryde Business Chamber breakfast meeting, I made a short message to to our MP, Mr. Jerome Laxale as follows:

“DAPA is an NDIS Service Provider. We are working with the government in two areas. We are contributing to reduce NDIS budget in a long run and we are committed to train local care workers. However, English test is currently a barrier to accept care workers to work in Austraalia. Also the federal government reduced trainees’ wage concession from 50% down to only 10%. Hence our training program is difficult to carry out this year.”

This coming month, I would like everyone in our organization to download our MMLink App and become a member through our website www.dap.asn.au. That includes all the participants, staff. MC members and also to encourage our volunteers and friends to do the same. Hopefully, we get more feedback to improve our App and our activities.

In March, we should be more active in the International Harmony week starting 21st March every year. I will propose to take MMLink a step closer to the community.”

– Vincent Yu.

22/02/2023.

On Saturday 4 February 2023, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Eastwood Plaza for the Lunar New Year celebrations. Parties in attendance included NSW Opposition and Labor leader, Chris Minns, the Federal Member for Bennelong, Jerome Laxale and NSW Labor candidate for Ryde, Lyndal Howison.  

Lunch was organised for the PM, MP’s and the local community leaders including DAPA President Vincent Yu. Following the lunch, a press conference was held in Eastwood Plaza where the PM and MP’s gave speehes. 

A Lion dance was performed near the Eastwood Plaza, outside DAPA’s office.

As part of the dance, the Prime Minister was presented with the traditional lettuce that was hanging outside DAPA’s office door. This tradition stems from the Chinese and Cantonese language where the word for leafy green vegetables sounds similar to the word for becoming wealthy. According to popular belief, when the lion eats the lettuce and spits it back out at the business owners and audience, it symbolizes blessing them with wealth and prosperity in the new year. The PM joined the rest of the celebrations with community members and local leaders. 

The Chinese New Year Celebrations at Eastwood Plaza on the 28^th January was hosted by the Eastwood Chinese Senior Citizens Club. DAPA was a gold sponsor for the event and was honoured with seats with VIP guests in the front row including Mr. Jerome Laxale MP, Mr. Hugh Lee OAM and Mr. Jordan Lane, previous Mayor for Ryde and Current Liberal Party candidate for the upcoming NSW election. The event was later graced by Ms. Tanya Plibersek, Minister for Environment.  

Our participants and staff helped organise the event by arriving early and assisting with the seating arrangements for the Plaza Stage.  

DAPA contributed to several activities in the event including sponsoring ‘The Lion Kids’ to perform a lion dance leading to our office which was joined by the people of the community and our guests and received applause, our sponsor stall where our arts teacher Mrs. Chen taught writing Chinese New Year wishes in calligraphic style to wish people luck for the coming year and finally a live music performance. 

Our participant Bowman played his guitar along with his band of four friends who performed two Chinese songs together. Bowman was extremely proud of his wonderful performance that was thoroughly enjoyed that afternoon. 

Watch Bowman and his band’s performance below. 

There were also other music, art and dance performances from the Eastwood community.

The best part of that afternoon for many DAPA participants was the Lion dance that was performed outside our offices and the photo session that followed afterwards.  

Although the Prime minister was not able to attend this event, he did visit DAPA and the Eastwood community the following week for another Lunar celebration. 

Stay tuned to our blog to view the updates of the Prime Minister’s visit to the Eastwood community and DAPA.