The other day, as a member of a group, I received an email, stating that on the eve of Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month, New York City Comptroller’s office decided to honor the following honorees:
- Dil Afroz “Nargis” Ahmed, President, Bangladesh Society
- Tiloma Jayasinghe, Executive Director, Sakhi for South Asian Women
- Grace Lyu-Volckhausen, Founding Board Member, Korean American League for Civic Action
- Cao K. O, Former Executive Director, Asian American Federation, and
- Liu Tee Shu, President, Flushing Chinese Business Association
The person who forwarded the email to us noticed that the President of the Bangladesh Society is one of the honorees and therefore, I assume, the sender felt that someone might be interested in this event. – And there I was! My interest was to know more about the Bangladesh Society and it’s honorable president as well as other honorees and their organizations. I tried to ‘google’ their names and names of their organizations. It was very easy to get information about following four honorees:
- Tiloma Jayasinghe, Executive Director, Sakhi for South Asian Women
- Grace Lyu-Volckhausen, Founding Board Member, Korean American League for Civic Action
- Cao K. O, Former Executive Director, Asian American Federation
and - Liu Tee Shu, President, Flushing Chinese Business Association
However, it was difficult to find any reliable information about other honoree – Dil Afroz “Nargis” Ahmed, and her organization, Bangladesh Society.
Searching online (using Google, Bing, Yahoo), “Dil Afroz “Nargis” Ahmed” and “Bangladesh Society” gave me some pictures of Ms. Dil Afroz and almost no information about Bangladesh Society. Searching with different variations (Bangladesh Society Inc, Bangladesh Society USA, etc.) was equally futile. However, the search for Bangladesh Society gave me names of few same/similar organizations but no information about the Society itself and its activities. A Facebook page with the same organization’s name has almost no information! There is no way to know whether this is indeed the Society’s Facebook page or not!
It seems like that the Bangladesh Society does not have any website, therefore, it is almost impossible to find any pertinent information about the Society, its activities or programs, its origin, its history, its staff etc.
Not finding information about the Bangladesh Society online certainly does not mean that the Society is not active or not beneficial to the community. It simply raise a question – when many other ethnic communities (above honorees for example) have their online presence, why Bangladesh Society cannot maintain some kind of web presence?
According to some 3rd party unverified sources [here] and [here], Bangladesh Society is more than 37 years old and has more than 10,000 active members. How Bangladesh Society keep in touch with their vast number of members? Perhaps they are using phone, emails, personal contacts etc. However, anyone interested in knowing about the Bangladesh Society’s history, programs, activities, reasearch, impact, contribution, events will be disappointed by the lack of information about this long-standing organization as there is no way to know if you are an outsider.