By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Next year, throngs of soccer fans will pour through the streets of Seattle, intent upon attending the FIFA World Cup games at Seattle’s Lumen Field. For some of the more than 300 small businesses in the Chinatown-International District (CID), which is at the epicenter of the event, this might be cause for anxiety—especially after the neighborhood’s experience during the 2023 Major League Baseball (MLB) All-Star Game.
But Carmen Pan, the designated neighborhood liaison, is here to help relieve some of that anxiety.
Neighborhood liaisons for the World Cup are part of an initiative by the City of Seattle, which opted to create the temporary positions to serve historically underrepresented communities. Local preservation organization, the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority (SCIDpda), was in charge of choosing the neighborhood liaison for the CID. SCIDpda chose Pan for a number of reasons, including that she is multilingual, SCIDpda’s director of community development An Huynh said. Pan has been with SCIDpda since mid-June.
“We wanted to find someone who had experience with event planning and definitely someone with language capacity, since we know that a lot of businesses in the CID speak another language other than English, primarily Cantonese, Mandarin, and Vietnamese,” Huynh said of how they chose Pan. “And [we wanted] someone who is comfortable with putting themselves out there and doing that door-to-door outreach and relationship building that is really needed for a role like this.”
Carmen Pan
In order to build trust with businesses, Pan’s work began well ahead of next summer’s games. Her first day doing outreach and in-person visits to businesses was July 15, Huynh said.
The way Pan interacts with the CID’s small businesses is similar to how the rest of SCIDpda has been interacting with small businesses in its work to help business owners through the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of this work involves both online and in-person multilingual communication, and keeping the community up-to-date.
“In addition to that, something that we started doing for the World Cup is also hosting informational sessions,” Huynh said. She explained that such informational sessions can be recorded and that there are subtitles in Vietnamese and different Chinese dialects provided after.
“We also provide language accessibility by inviting interpreters when it’s needed and appropriate,” she added.
More than 700,000 people are expected to attend the World Cup next year, Huynh said. While neither Pan’s nor SCIDpda’s work encompasses directly working with creating routes for increased foot traffic, Huynh said that they are working to keep open dialogue and up-to-date information for concerned business owners.
“What we hear is businesses wanting to maintain access and parking for their staff, customers, and operations as much as possible,” Huynh said. “I think we’ve also heard that because there’s going to be so many people walking around, making sure that the pedestrian infrastructure is accessible and safe.”
Huynh said that “our most recent lesson learned” was during the week of the MLB All-Star Game. She said that much of what went awry boiled down to a lack of communication between organizers and the involved neighborhoods, as well as a lack of coordination around messaging.
“The messaging for All-Star Week was very conflicting in that there was some messaging that was saying, avoid the area, but then businesses were told to ramp up as well,” Huynh said. “I think a lot of the communication that the CID was getting felt very last minute and haphazard.”
Fortunately, Huynh said, it appears that the level of planning in advance of the World Cup games is much different and improved from MLB All-Star Week.
“I think with the liaison, it’s really showing that the local organizing committee is committed to ensuring that the CID is seeing benefits from these mega-events so that we don’t repeat something like MLB All-Star Week again,” Huynh said. “[It shows that they are] making sure that CID small business needs are being reflected in the planning and we have someone dedicated to being that conduit between event organizers and businesses.”
For the most part, until 2026 hits and there’s more information available, such as what teams will be participating, planning and coordinating will remain at a lower level, Huynh said.
“In the meantime, we are planning to host at least two more small business info sessions between now and probably next spring as more resources and information come online,” Huynh said. “We’ll be digesting that first ourselves, and then figuring out ways to share that information in an accessible way for businesses to learn and figure out what that means for them on the operational side.”
Interested businesses and community members can watch webinars and keep up-to-date on SCIDpda’s FIFA World Cup work here.