Check out AAPI FORCE’s March 2020 voter guide, with instructions on how to vote, details about California’s new Voting Centers, details on how to vote for the presidential nominee, and details on what Prop 13 is.
Feel free to print out and share this resource with your friends, family, and community members. Let’s show the country what #AAPIpower looks like.
Download [PDF]
AAPIs for Civic Empowerment Education Fund organized the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Campaign School to develop the skills needed to advance AAPI power-building strategies at every level, and to strengthen organizations to mobilize AAPIs across the country. The School elevated integrated voter engagement (IVE) strategies that combine grassroots organizing with voter mobilization as a key path to building power. New AAPI civic engagement leaders received training by seasoned IVE practitioners to become better organizers, campaign leads, and directors. The School consisted of plenary sessions setting the political landscape, breakout trainings for skills development, and strategy sessions to address specific challenges. Together we explored our strategic role as AAPIs to build governing power in our states, and strategies to unite a multiracial voter bloc at the local, state, and national levels.
Read the full report [PDF]
This toolkit represents the work and thinking of 15 grassroots organizations with Asian American bases living in the most precarious margins of power: low-income tenants, youth, undocumented immigrants, low-wage workers, refugees, women and girls, and queer and trans people. It reflects their experiences with criminalization, deportation, homophobia, xenophobia and Islamo-racism, war, gender violence, poverty, and worker exploitation. All of the modules are designed to begin with people’s lived experiences, and to build structural awareness of why those experiences are happening, and how they are tied to the oppression of others. By highlighting the role of people’s resistance both past and present, the toolkit also seeks to build hope and a commitment to political struggle. In these perilous times, it is an intervention by today’s Asian American activists to restore our collective humanity across our differences through a practice of deep democracy, by looking first to history and then to one another to build a vigilant and expansive love for the people.
The Toolkit is a project hosted by Asian American Pacific Islanders for Civic Empowerment, which is a California statewide formation whose purpose is to advance state politics, campaigns and other issues that support low-income AAPIs by building statewide AAPI civic engagement infrastructure and serving as a resource for emerging AAPI organizations. The founding organizations are APEN, CPA, KRC, and FAJ.
The Toolkit project includes the following organizations:
Asian Pacific Environmental Network – Chinese Progressive Association SF Korean Resource Center – Filipino Advocates for Justice
CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities – PrYSM – DRUM
Khmer Girls in Action – 1Love Movement – AYPAL: Building API Power VAYLA New Orleans – Freedom Inc
Korean American Resource and Culture Center – Mekong NYC – VietLEAD
Download the toolkit here.
Join us on May 21st at 1PM PST for a Twitter Townhall discussing #AAPIPower2018 and the issues we’re deciding on in the CA June Primary election. Participate in the live conversation withJenny Yang, Comic/Writer, Timmy Lu from AAPIs for Civic Empowerment Education Fund, Amy Horn from Khmer Girls in Action, Cha Vang from Hmong Innovating Politics (HIP) and Seng So from Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN).
At no point in the history of the continental US is there a greater opportunity for AAPIs to influence U.S. politics than today. To put this moment in context, in the 1960s (when the term “Asian American” was first coined), there were 1 million AAPIs, reflecting merely half a percent of the US population. In the 1980s when Southeast Asians arrived in large numbers, AAPIs still represented less than two percent of the US population at 3.5 million. Today, there are over 20 million Asian Americans and 1.5 million Pacific Islanders, at nearly six percent of the total US population. By 2065, demographers predict that the entire US will be 14% AAPI, with a total population of 61 million. For the first time, AAPIs represent a significant political constituency in national elections. And barring significant shifts in racial identity or immigration policy, over the next four decades that significance will only grow.
Read the full article on Organizing Upgrade!