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 Chinatown 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. We partner with existing neighborhood organizations to create innovative projects that address ongoing disparities that affect our community. The objective of 8centric is to develop community leaders by identifying social issues and creating an effective strategy to address them in order to create a positive change.

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 help people, 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.

We focus our attentions on developing young working professionals and soon-to-graduate college students into community leaders. High schoolers and college students have many outlets to gain experiences, so what happens after school is over? 8centric wants to give young adults the opportunity to get back into the community to share knowledge, become leaders, and to see that there's more than just working 40 hours a week and looking forward to that one vacation per year. Think about what contributions you can make to society, and let 8centric help you with that.