By Ellie Ta, 2025 CLA Intern
Community and coalitions. These words sit differently in my head now, post-CLA. 9 weeks ago, they were buzz words; they appeared in mission statements, as words to loftily gesture at but never touch.
The cohort often jokes: “Thanks for tying my shoe for me, that was so community of us!” or, “Oh my gosh, Labubus? The Labubu coalition!”
We joke about it, but we also mean it. These words have peppered our vocabulary—beyond our casual jests—because they have texture now, a new sense of weight. They show up in the way we talk: how “that was so community of you” became our running joke. They show up when we can recognizing another host office not as an acronym on a spreadsheet but as the voice of the person we could call there. They linger in the habits we picked up from each other: the phrases we borrowed, the small emotes we unconsciously mimicked, or our ability to mirror the cadence of each others’ name, school, and host office introductions.
I didn’t leave CLA with a transformative reckoning of clarity, no single ‘why’ to pin to my chest as I left CTRL office. I left with smaller, stranger gifts. Even in the mock campaign, where we thought we were only holding each other up, we were also taking pieces of each other with us—bits of language, rhythm, and care that wove themselves quietly into who we are now, as CLA alumni.
Maybe that’s not seismic shift I was hoping to leave with—But it’s a slower erosion, hopefully shaping me in ways I’ll only notice later as I enter my second year of college with clearer intentions of uplifting AANHPI perspectives in whatever work I choose to pursue. Even small erosions eventually reshape stone; I trust that this subtle, almost invisible shift that CLA makes now will leave a lasting mark on the foundation I’m building for my future.
The connotations of community and coalition will forever be changed in my mental schema because of CLA. Though it didn’t hand me a single revelation, it has reshaped my idea of what it means to belong and make a difference. The end of CLA is bittersweet; it’s incredibly strange to transition into a space in which I won’t see my fourteen new friends every Monday and Friday in Little Tokyo. But I suppose that heaviness is the point—it means we built something real, something that is difficult to walk away from.
I know CLA isn’t the end of the road for the fifteen of us. We are still each other’s networks, a community of friends, beyond the scaffolding of the title “cohort.” And somewhere along the way, the “(CLA)” in everyone’s contacts disappeared because the label no longer fits. It’s a small, silly reminder that what we built together wasn’t just about the internship—that we’ll continue to
showupforeachotherasfriends—andandthat I nowhavepermissiontoannoyeveryonewith “Hi Hungry, I’mEllie”jokesfor life.
