How to Plan a Great ESEA Heritage Month Celebration at Work

Every September, organisations across the UK mark ESEA Heritage Month, a chance to recognise the histories, cultures, and contributions of East and Southeast Asian communities. Whether your company is planning its first celebration or looking to build on last year’s efforts, a thoughtful approach can turn a well-intentioned gesture into a genuinely memorable experience for everyone involved.

The good news is that you don’t have to plan it all from scratch, or get every cultural detail right on your own. Here’s a practical guide to putting together an ESEA Heritage Month celebration that feels authentic, inclusive, and worth the effort, plus a few pointers on when it’s worth bringing in specialists who do this for a living.

Start With Why

Before booking a caterer or designing a flyer, get clear on your purpose. Is this about visibility and representation for ESEA employees? Education for the broader workforce? Building community and connection? Most successful celebrations do all three, but naming your priorities early will shape every decision that follows, from budget allocation to which activities you emphasize.

Talk to ESEA employees at your company first. If you have an employee resource group (ERG) for Asian, ESEA, or AANHPI employees, they should be co-owners of this planning process, not an afterthought consulted after the agenda is set. If no such group exists, this could be the perfect moment to help one form. Either way, avoid the common mistake of a well-meaning HR or DEI team planning “for” a community rather than “with” them.

Understand the Breadth of the Community

One of the biggest planning pitfalls is treating “ESEA” or “Asian” as a single monolithic culture. East and Southeast Asia encompasses dozens of countries, including China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, among others, each with distinct languages, histories, religions, cuisines, and traditions.

A celebration that only features East Asian elements, or leans heavily on stereotypes like chopsticks-and-lanterns decor, can unintentionally alienate Southeast Asian colleagues and flatten a rich, diverse set of cultures into a caricature. Aim for programming that reflects this diversity rather than defaulting to the most commercially familiar touchpoints.

This is often where internal planning teams start to feel out of their depth, and understandably so. Getting the nuance right across dozens of distinct cultures takes more than good intentions; it takes people who know the traditions inside out. Experienced cultural event organisers, such as London-based Dear Asia, work with companies specifically to make sure celebrations reflect real ESEA traditions rather than a flattened, one-size-fits-all version of “Asian culture.”

Make Food and Culture the Centrepiece

If you only have the budget or bandwidth for one signature event this month, put your energy into a food and culture showcase. It’s the format that tends to draw the biggest turnout, works well for teams that are hybrid or time-poor, and gives people something to talk about long after the day is over.

Food is a wonderful entry point for cultural celebration, but it works best when it’s participatory rather than performative. A simple potluck, where employees bring dishes with personal significance and share the story behind them, is a lovely low-cost option. But September also happens to overlap with the Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrated as the Moon Festival in China, Chuseok in Korea, and Tsukimi in Japan, which makes for a much richer centrepiece if you want to do more than a bring-your-own-dish lunch.

A well-run showcase around this festival typically includes:

• A guided mooncake and tea tasting — mooncakes symbolise unity and completeness, and pairing them with a curated selection of Asian teas turns a simple tasting into a proper cultural moment.
• A hands-on Asian arts and crafts workshop, such as lantern-making, festival perfume bags, or dumpling folding, so people leave with something they made themselves.
• A game or activity, like a fun classic Chinese Mahjong workshop, to keep energy up and give colleagues a reason to linger and mingle.

This is exactly the kind of event that’s easy to get wrong on your own, oversimplifying it into “an Asian-themed lunch,” or getting a cultural detail wrong in a way that undercuts the goodwill of the whole gesture. It’s also genuinely hard to pull off well without help: sourcing authentic mooncakes and teas, briefing a calligraphy instructor, and running a craft station for 40 people in your office is a lot to coordinate on top of your day job.

This is where a specialist event organiser earns its keep. Companies like Dear Asia London build exactly this kind of workshop for offices — tastings, crafts, storytelling, and games bundled into a single booking — run by people who know the cultural detail inside out and have done it dozens of times for companies across London. Rather than assembling vendors, instructors, and decorations yourself, you get one point of contact who turns up, sets up, runs the session, and packs down, leaving your team free to just enjoy the day.

Get the Details Right

Budget and resources. Determine early what funding is available and where it will come from, whether that’s a dedicated DEI budget, department contributions, or ERG fundraising. Be transparent with organisers about constraints so expectations stay realistic, and factor in that a done-for-you workshop often costs less in total than sourcing catering, materials, and instructors separately.

Accessibility and inclusion. Schedule events at times that accommodate different working hours, especially for global or hybrid teams. Avoid tokenism. One of the most common complaints from employees about heritage month celebrations is that they feel performative, heavy on marketing, and light on substance. If your company only engages with ESEA issues one month a year, consider how you might extend visibility, mentorship, and advancement opportunities for ESEA employees throughout the rest of the year too.

Make participation optional but easy. Not every ESEA employee wants to be a spokesperson for their culture, and no one should feel obligated to participate or share personal stories.

Bringing ESEA Heritage Month to Life With Dear Asia

Planning an ESEA Heritage Month celebration takes intention, humility, and genuine partnership with the people it’s meant to honour. Done well, it becomes more than an event on the calendar. It becomes a small but real investment in a workplace where people feel seen, valued, and connected to one another.

If all of this sounds like a lot to take on alongside your regular workload, you don’t have to do it alone. The easiest way to get a celebration right, without the stress of sourcing vendors, briefing instructors, or second-guessing cultural details, is to work with a professional event organiser who specialises in Asian culture. Dear Asia London does exactly this: full-service ESEA Heritage Month and Mid-Autumn Festival workshops for offices, covering everything from mooncake and tea tastings to calligraphy, lantern-making, and Mahjong, for teams of 15 to 60. Good dates fill up quickly in September, so if you’re weighing whether to plan it in-house or bring in specialists, it’s worth reaching out early to see what a hassle-free celebration could look like for your team.