8centric

Mission

8centric helps connect people to their communities. High schoolers and college students have many outlets to gain experiences, so what happens after school is over?

8centric provides the opportunities to get involved in the community to share knowledge, become less content, and to see that there's more than just working 40 hours a week and looking forward to that one vacation per year. We partner with existing neighborhood organizations to create innovative projects that address ongoing disparities that affect our communities. By having more community leaders, we can collectively identify social issues and create strategies to address them. Think about what contributions you can make to society, and let 8centric help you with that.

Origin of 8centric

8centric [ey-sen-trik] is a combination of the auspicious number eight and the word "acentric."

Eight is well represented in many Asian cultures like the Noble Eightfold Paths, the Eight Immortals, Hindu Goddess Lakshmi's eightfold forms, and Japanese's symbol for increasing prosperity. In essence, eight is a very Asian-y number. "Acentric" is defined as without a center, it also describes the 350,000 Massachusetts Asian Americans who are living in various enclaves with limited access to one another. Thus, 8centric was created to redefine the effect of acentric by being the hub that connects people.

History & Background

8centric was formed in the summer of 2008 by volunteers who are all proponents of community-oriented work. We have identified unaddressed problems in the Boston community that could be remedied with zero to minimum cost and completely volunteer-operated by a large pool of volunteers from local colleges and working professionals.

There are over 36,000 nonprofits in Massachusetts. How many of them do you know that work together and share resources? 8centric believes that through partnerships, more resources can be allocated to help the community. Nonprofits are established with one primary goal and that is to provide services, not to make money nor provide jobs.

8centric’s constituents are the community residents, the non-profit organizations, and the volunteers. Each of our projects cannot work if any one of the three key components is missing. All projects initiated by 8centric must be able to fulfill several criteria: providing a service for the residents and offering opportunities for them to be part of the decision making; collaborating with an organization to share ideas and resources to maximize efficiency and uphold accountability; provide volunteers an insight to the community and leadership opportunities to lead and create projects; to act on behalf of the community to build a positive and enduring change.