When the Northwest Language & Cultural Center — or NWLCC, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching and celebrating languages and cultures — closed in 2022 following the sudden death of its leader, a local woman knew it would leave a void in the South Whidbey community.

Hai Anh Vu, who at the time was volunteering at the nonprofit, wanted to carry on NWLCC’s legacy while also providing more enrichment opportunities for kids. Josette Hendrix, who founded the organization, passed away in April 2022.

A year later, Vu started the Whidbey Island Language, Art & STEM Center.

The center, also known as WILASC, offers language, music, art and STEM classes to kids in kindergarten, elementary and middle schools.

Vu has been living on Whidbey Island since 2020, when she moved from Hong Kong with her two daughters and husband to start a farm life in Greenbank.

“When we moved here, I didn’t find a lot of extra activities for the kids, especially in the language area,” said Vu, whose kids can speak Vietnamese — her native language — and were learning Mandarin in Hong Kong.

As she spoke with other parents, the need for an after-school program to learn useful skills became more obvious to Vu, inspiring her to create a program herself.

In the spring, WILASC received a “Boost your Business” grant to support local businesses run by women and minorities. The grant came from the Island County Economic Development Council, funded by the Washington Department of Commerce’s Small Business Innovation Fund.

Thanks to the grant, Vu was able to purchase 12 laptops for the coding class, which made its debut this summer as a two-week camp along with 13 other camps that saw the participation of over 100 students partaking in Spanish, Chinese, art and coding activities.

Justin MacDonald decided to teach coding at WILASC after meeting Vu, as their kids go to school together. He has a background of teaching coding and statistics to college students, as well as math to middle schoolers.

“It was really appealing for me to have the opportunity to actually teach coding to kids,” he said.

The course is to get kids excited about coding and to teach them the basics of programming languages, like Python.

Vu wanted to include coding in her program as she believes it helps develop transferable skills, like problem solving and the ability to work in a group. A student might even find out that coding is something they might want to pursue as a career.

Claudia Kiyama is a Spanish teacher at Waldorf School and has joined the program after her daughter joined the summer camp. Like Vu, she felt kids needed a place where kids could learn while having fun.

Her Spanish class will involve storytelling, singing songs, playing games and conversing while focusing on pronunciation and vocabulary.

Kiyama comes from Mexico and is a native speaker, which she believes will help students learn the correct pronunciation of words.

The class is open to kids from Spanish-speaking households who need to improve and kids with no knowledge of Spanish.

Vu plans to expand WILASC by serving the community outside of South Whidbey and by providing more classes.

“We receive requests from the community for many types of classes, from multicultural cooking to language clubs to herbal science,” Vu said in a press release.

WILASC also offers a “Fun Math” class where children can improve their math skills through games like yoga, cribbage, Yahtzee and juggling, an art class that explores different techniques, a chess club, a yoga class and an introduction to choir.

The program works on an on-demand-basis and gives priority to students, but Vu is open to arrange something for people of all ages if they come forward with a request to participate.

WILASC welcomes anyone with expertise in a certain field to apply for teaching opportunities.

“You don’t have to be a teacher,” Vu said. “But knowing how to teach and interact with children is essential to us because we want to make sure that kids are safe and also entertained when they attend the classes.”

The center will continue to operate during the school year after classes and is located at the South Whidbey Community Center in Langley, where the kids can be dropped off by the bus on their way back from school.

Vu said this should also help working parents with after school care. For example, parents with two children who finish school at different times can enroll one of their kids in one of the classes, so they can pick them at the same time rather than separately.

For more information, visit wilasc.com.