Alum Credits ‘Arts World’ Foundation in Advocacy Leadership
Triple Terrier Ben Hires (CAS’00, STH’03, MET’08) was recently saluted by Bostonia as a BU alumni “Opening Doors” for future generations. As CEO of the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center (BCNC), the largest Asian immigrant multiservice organization in Greater Boston, Hires today provides direct community support through efforts designed to make Boston more diverse and equitable by providing families and children key opportunities to help acclimate.
“We’re helping the Chinese immigrant community and many other immigrant communities be successful,” Hires explains. “Whether you’re an immigrant from China or an immigrant from Ireland, I think each of these communities at different times has faced barriers, and our organization is helping to level that playing field as much as possible.”
But before he was ready to take on such meaningful work, Hires got a key push from BU MET faculty.
“I audited a class at Metropolitan College called The Art World, taught by Rich Maloney, who was at the time the assistant director of the Arts Administration Program. I got to know him well and really liked his class. He encouraged me to enter the program,” Hires explains. “Those pathways got me into my work in the youth arts.”
Hires and his wife, Tina Lin (MET’13), have a young child, which motivates his equity and inclusion work. “We have a three-year-old who has all these multiple identities, and the idea of being part of an organization that could help me raise my son, recognizing and valuing his background, was important to me,” he says.
Equipped with his MS in Arts Administration, Hires now seeks to build new partnerships with values-committed leaders across Boston, to amplify each other’s work and better accomplish their goals.
“Some of the issues that we’re trying to tackle—it’s not any one organization that is going to solve these things,” Hires says. “It’s going to be organizations in the same community working together, organizations across different neighborhoods working together, organizations from different sectors working together.”
Read more in Bostonia’s Opening Doors series.