About Us

Who We Are

The South-East Asia Center (SEAC) is a community-based, educational and social service organization building bridges of understanding and cooperation between peoples of Old and New World cultures.

SEAC serves some of the most culturally diverse immigrant neighborhoods in the United States, with over one hundred different languages spoken by residents within its borders. SEAC's Uptown-Edgewater home base is also one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, with some forty-three percent of Uptown children and twenty-six percent of Edgewater children living under the poverty line. Many of the immigrants and refugees served at SEAC come from rural societies where education and literacy are scarce commodities.

SEAC’s more than 30 staff and over 100 volunteers provide cultural, emotional, and educational aid and social services to over 8,000 of the needy each year.

Our Staff Languages

South-East Asia Center (SEAC) specializes in building inter-ethnic bridges. We serve peoples from China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia & the Philippines, as well as neighboring South Asia, West Asia, and immigrants from Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and Latin America as well as native-born Americans of all ancestries.

South-East Asia Center promotes mutual understanding and cooperation. Staff speak major Chinese dialects, Hindi, Indonesian, German, Latvian, Malaysian, Russian, Urdu, Vietnamese, as well as other languages.