At a glance
The Khmer Student Association’s Annual Khmer New Year Show celebrates its 30th anniversary with a student-led event honoring… Read full summary
- Funding received
- 2025-2026
- Large
- Awarded
- $7,132
- Funding partners
-
- Services and Activities Fee (SAF)
The Khmer Student Association’s Annual Khmer New Year Show celebrates its 30th anniversary with a student-led event honoring Khmer culture, resilience, and community. This year focuses on the theme “The Spirit That Never Fades,” and brings together over 500 students, families, alumni, and community members through traditional dance, music, fashion, and storytelling. The Khmer New Year Show serves as a space for cultural preservation, education, and healing by uplifting Khmer history and fostering intergenerational connection. This student-led show collaborates with the broader Seattle community to preserve traditions, support belonging, and expand cultural awareness at UW. Funds will be used to reserve the HUB Ballroom.
Angelina Khun
Project lead
- akhun935@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Student
- Years
- 2 year(s) remaining at UW
- Affiliated groups
- UW Khmer Student Association
Project Letter of Intent
The Khmer Student Association (KHSA) at the University of Washington is excited to host its Annual Khmer New Year Show, marking the 30th anniversary on May 2nd, 2026. This student-led event honors Khmer culture, people, and our strong sense of community. Our theme this year, “The Spirit That Never Fades,” illustrates what it means to be Khmer: remaining joyful, proud, and resilient even during challenging times. Each year, more than 500 students, alumni, and community members from places such as White Center, Renton, Tacoma, and Kent join us to celebrate with traditional dances, skits, fashion shows, and music. For us, this event is more than a celebration. It helps us keep our culture and community alive at UW. It also provides Khmer students with a space where they feel supported, seen, and connected as we learn about our heritage together.
Key goals include:
- Cultural Preservation: Highlight the diversity of Khmer culture through traditional dances, music, and fashion. Elders, performers, community leaders share stories, skills, and knowledge with everyone else in hope to teach/inspire. This way, cultural practices are not just observed but learned and passed on. By offering live experiences, we hope to deepen appreciation for our heritage and keep Khmer traditions vibrant for the future.
- Community Building: Bring together students, families, alumni, and staff from many backgrounds, both Khmer and non-Khmer. By creating a welcoming and inclusive space, the event encourages real connections and new friendships across generations. Our gathering helps build stronger community ties, mutual respect, and greater cultural understanding, so everyone feels they belong.
- Educational Impact: Offer performances that share the history and achievements of the Khmer people. Our goal is to help more people understand Khmer history, show the ongoing strength of our community. By reaching both Khmer and non-Khmer audiences, we hope to inspire more awareness of culture.
- Resilience and Healing: We create a supportive space for both remembrance and celebration, where the Khmer community and our allies can honor our heritage and help each other heal from past trauma. Through storytelling, we recognize the challenges our community has faced and celebrate our lasting spirit. This space encourages everyone to celebrate and also reflect on key history.
The Khmer New Year Show supports the Campus Sustainability Fund's mission by promoting cultural awareness, building student leadership, and encouraging community education/ outreach. These values guide our planning and collaboration in creating lasting impact within the UW community.
- Cultural Ideology: We view cultural preservation as an important factor of sustainability, keeping traditions alive is how we continue to grow and remain connected as a community. By sharing these traditions, we challenge the idea that sustainability is only about the physical environment, it’s also about sustaining identities, values, and communities that have been underrepresented. We also practice sustainability by reusing and repurposing a lot of our materials such as clothing, decorations, and props every year.
- Leadership & Student Involvement: Since this project is entirely student-led, each officer member takes ownership of different parts of the event. By breaking off into groups, this encourages collaboration, mentorship, and leadership development. As treasurer, I help manage our budget and funding, making sure we are on track to following our budget, and also handling any cash related things at the event.
- Education, outreach, & behavior change: Our event brings people of all ages and backgrounds into one shared space. Through performances we hope to raise awareness about our culture and inspire others to learn about different cultural groups.
- Accountability: With many of us being a part of previous Khmer New Year Shows as volunteers and other leadership positions, we are ready to step into our next position in leading the next leaders. We have been planning this early fall and have gotten the rest of the team on track with their next steps.
Development of roles
Committee leads: Each officer member is responsible for 1 group but is helping all around, this allows us all to be in the loop of everything easier.
- Dance: Suorsdey* and Darla, Rumonny
- Fashion Show: Suorsdey, Rumonny, Maybelline
- Volunteers: Sophia*
- Food: Benten*, Sophia, Maybelline
- Raffle: Angelina and Victoria
- Decorations: Lily*, Malli, Maybelline, Rumonny
- Skits: Ryan, Darla, Malli, Tony
Rick Young
SAO Advisor
- ryoung95@uw.edu
- Affiliation and department
- Faculty
- Stakeholder approval form
Request amount and budget
How the project will react to funding reductions
If the project receives less funding, we will focus on keeping the main cultural and educational parts of the Khmer New Year Show. We will reuse as many supplies from previous years as possible and reduce spending on decorations.
-With a 10% reduction, we would reduce spending on new decorations and props by prioritizing existing materials from past years, including backdrops, table decor, and storytelling props. We would also minimize raffle related costs, instead we can do a lot of outreach for donations.
-With a 20% reduction, we would further limit new decor purchases and simplify stage setup, using reusable and borrowed items. We would also rely more heavily on digital outreach.
Plans for financial longevity
n/a
Plans for long-term project management
n/a
Problem statement
At the University of Washington, people often think of sustainability mainly in terms of our environment. While this is very important, sometimes we can miss the need to support cultures and communities, which could be shown more throughout the campus. For Khmer students and community members, keeping our culture alive is important because we need to continue to learn from one generation to another and keep our stories alive.
The Khmer Student Association’s Annual Khmer New Year Show was created in response to this need. Many KHSA members, including me, come from communities such as White Center and South King County, where the Khmer older generation has struggled with intergenerational trauma, resources, and limited representation. Our lived experiences has inspired the creation of this growing project as a space for healing, pride, and visibility within the UW community and others. Through performance, storytelling, and community gatherings, this event promotes sustainability by recognizing and educating Khmer traditional practices. In order to ensure that cultural practices are not only shown but also actively being taught and carried out, we mentor the next group of students in being involved with this event so that it can be further passed down.
Problem context
Measure the impacts
| Impact / goal | Metric(s) of success | UW stakeholders impacted |
|---|---|---|
| Goal: 50+ past KHSA members to show up at the show | We will keep of how many returning members show up to support the event! | Graduate, Alumni |
| Goal: 50 new random people who just wanted to learn more that is associated with UW | Keep track of who is at the event that has nothing todo with KHSA but just wanted to learn more! | Undergraduate, Academic staff, Admin staff |