Gaining national recognition as a folk artist due to the Arts Centre's efforts, Ng was awarded the National Heritage Fellowship in 1992. The Folk Art program also showcased traditions such as seal carving, shadow puppets, pointed brush technique in Chinese calligraphy, and ornamental art in classical Chinese architecture. As a gateway for artists, dancers, staff, interns, students, teachers, volunteers, and audience, AAAC has passed on the traditional and contemporary dynamics of its community's heritage. The Public Education program began with figure drawing classes, evolving to offer gallery talks, performances, t'ai chi workshops, and the on-site Saturday Community Art School for children. The off-site education programs took place in public and private schools, and in other community sites in the five boroughs in New York. “Stories of Chinatown”, an off-site program organized in partnership with M.S. 131 that ran from 2001 to 2007, brought local seniors and youth together to make ceramic mural portraits portraying the seniors’ lives. A frequent recipient and benefactor of government grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) since the 1970s, the Arts Centre experienced a loss in funding when Congress reduced the NEA's annual budget from $180 million to $99.5 million in 1996 as a result of pressure from conservative American interest groups and Congress members including the American Family Foundation, Heritage Foundation, and former U.S. Senator Jesse Helms amid controversy around government funding toward sexually explicit art by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. This also impacted the availability of state- and city-level grant funding from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), both of which receive funding from the NEA. As a local cultural non-profit that derived a large portion of its budget from public funding, AAAC was forced to scale back its programming from the mid-1990s to the late-2000s. In 2010, AAAC officially moved its location from 26 Bowery Street to 111 Norfolk Street. No longer possessing a gallery space, the Arts Centre continues to remain active in the Lower Manhattan community by organizing off-site exhibitions and panel discussions, and by pursuing public arts education through its blog, social media sites, and contributions to publications such as "Asian American Matters: A New York Anthology" by Russell Leong. Concurrently, AAAC has redistributed much of its organizational activity towards archival documentation, historical record-keeping, and organizing its extensive permanent collection.