MEMBERSHIP
Through our organizations, our work is rooted in bases that live in the most precarious margins of power: refugees, low-wage workers, youth, undocumented immigrants, queer and trans people, and low-income tenants. Our current membership consists of base-building organizations in Asian communities across all regions of the United States. Our membership aims to deepen our base-building, leadership development and political education of working-class Asian communities to raise the consciousness in our communities in order to build powerful movements that win material changes in our communities.
If you are a grassroots organization that organizes a base of working-class Asian communities, provide political education and leadership development to your members, and are interested in joining Grassroots Asians Rising, you can reach out to us at info@grassrootsasians.org and a staff member will be in touch to set-up a one-on-one to assess alignment.
CALIFORNIA
Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC)
The Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) is a grassroots organization working to empower and organize our community towards justice and self-determination for all. AROC members build community power in the Bay Area by participating in leadership development, political education, and campaigns.
Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN)
APEN is building the power of Asian immigrant and refugee communities in California for environmental and social justice. Through building an organized movement, APEN strives to bring fundamental changes to economic and social institutions that will prioritize public good over profits and promote the right of every person to a decent, safe, affordable quality of life.
Asian Prisoner Support Committee (APSC)
Asian Prisoner Support Committee (APSC) provides direct support to Asian and Pacific Islander (API) prisoners and to raise awareness about the growing number of APIs being imprisoned, detained, and deported. APSC facilitates Ethnic Studies programs in prisons, provides community-based reentry services, and organizes deportation defense campaigns.
AYPAL: Building API Community Power
AYPAL is a leadership development, community organizing and coalition building organization that seeks to create healthy, safe, and thriving communities. AYPAL empowers Oakland’s low-income Asian & Pacific Islander immigrant and refugee families to be leaders for school reform and neighborhood change.
California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative
The California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative is a statewide grassroots organization that addresses health, environmental, reproductive justice, and other issues faced by low-income, female, Vietnamese immigrant and refugees.
Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED)
Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED) is an all volunteer, multi-ethnic, intergenerational organization based in Los Angeles Chinatown that builds grassroots power through organizing, education, and mutual help.
Chinese Progressive Association (CPA - San Francisco)
Founded in 1972, CPA educates, organizes and empowers the low income and working class immigrant Chinese community in San Francisco to build collective power with other oppressed communities to demand better living and working conditions and justice for all people.
Empowering Marginalized Asian Communities (EMAC)
EMAC works to support marginalized Southeast Asians by empowering our communities through advocacy and healing from our present and past disparities to build an equitable and robust future. EMAC creates programs and services, develop partnerships, and changing policies, practices to improve communities.
Filipino Advocates for Justice (FAJ)
Filipino Advocates for Justice's mission is to build a strong and empowered Filipino community by organizing constituents, developing leaders, providing services, and advocating for policies that promote social and economic justice and equity.
Hmong Innovating Politics (HIP)
HIP is a grassroots organization with the mission of strengthening the political power of Hmong and disenfranchised communities through innovative civic engagement and strategic grassroots mobilization.
Jakara Movement
The Jakara Movement is a grassroots community-building organization working to empower, educate, and organize Punjabi Sikhs, and other marginalized communities; to advance their health, education, and economic, social, and political power.
Lavender Phoenix
Lavender Phoenix builds queer and transgender Asian and Pacific Islander power to amplify our voices and increase the visibility of our communities. Through organizing in the Bay Area, Lavender Phoenix inspires and trains grassroots leaders, transform our values from scarcity to abundance, and partner with organizations to sustain a vibrant movement ecosystem.
Pilipino Workers Center (PWC)
Pilipino Workers Center aims to secure the dignity and safety of the Pilipinx community in Southern California. PWC provides support for human trafficking survivors, immigration legal services, affordable housing, workforce certification training, education on workers’ rights, enforcement of wage theft, free tax preparation, and a cooperative for homecare workers.
GEORGIA
Asian American Advocacy Fund (AAAF)
The Asian American Advocacy Fund advocates for the civil and human rights of Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Native Hawaiians in Georgia. Through a combination of policy advocacy at local, state, and federal levels, and by supporting candidates that believe in our values, AAAF fights to create a better Georgia for us all.
ILLINOIS
Arab American Action Network (AAAN)
AAAN strives to strengthen the Arab community in the Chicago area by building its capacity to be an active agent for positive social change. As a grassroots nonprofit, our strategies include community organizing, advocacy, education, providing social services, leadership development, cultural outreach and forging productive relationships with other communities.
HANA Center
HANA Center is a Chicago-area nonprofit organization that works to meet the critical needs of Korean, Asian American, and multiethnic immigrant communities. HANA Center builds power towards systemic change through organizing the community, providing critical services, and providing political education.
MASSACHUSETTS
Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW)
The Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW) is a political home for pan-Asian communities in Greater Boston. We are a member-led organization committed to building grassroots power through political education, creative expression, and issue-based and neighborhood organizing.
MICHIGAN
Rising Voices
Rising Voices seeks to organize and develop the leadership of Asian American women (cis, trans, Gender Non-Conforming and femme-identifying) and young people for power around progressive values and policy in the state of Michigan.
NEW YORK
Adhikaar
Since 2005, Adhikaar has been committed to improving the lives of the Nepali-speaking community and getting our voices heard in the social justice movement. We have assisted thousands of individuals and families; trained hundreds of new leaders; and successfully changed policies and created new laws at local, state, national, and international levels.
CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities
CAAAV works to build grassroots community power across diverse poor and working class Asian immigrant communities in New York City. CAAAV develops the leadership of working class Asian immigrants to make a significant intervention in the gentrification of NYC by building neighborhood power in Chinatown and Astoria.
Damayan Migrant Workers Association
Damayan is a grassroots organization that serves and empowers low-wage Filipino migrant workers living and working in New York City and New Jersey, especially domestic workers and labor trafficking survivors or modern day slaves. Most of Damayan’s members are undocumented, so Damayan helps them know their rights so they can protect themselves and live without fear.
Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM)
DRUM was founded in 2000 to mobilize and build the leadership of thousands of low-income, South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrants to lead social and policy change that impacts their own lives- from immigrant rights to education reform, civil rights, and worker’s justice.
Red Canary Song
Red Canary Song is are a grassroots massage worker coalition in the U.S. The coalition works to provide labor rights and collective organizing for migrant massage workers, and protection from violence by police and police impersonators across the United States and within the diaspora in Toronto, Paris, and Hong Kong.
Laal
By leading and organizing Bengali womxn, Laal hopes to build the largest Bengali voting bloc in NYC’s history. Through Laal's programs, Laal womxn are becoming activists themselves from understanding and advocating for themselves alongside gender justice, land use and environmental justice, to reproductive and abortion justice.
NORTH CAROLINA
SEAC Village
SEAC Village is a Black- and Southeast Asian-led organization in Charlotte, North Carolina. SEAC Village works to to reinforce and uphold integrity, empowerment, inclusion, tradition, leadership, and critical consciousness at the grassroots level through political programming, mutual aid work, and community building.
OHIO
OPAWL: Buildling AAPI Feminist Leadership
OPAWL is a grassroots member-led community that organizes for social justice and elevates the voices, visibility, and progressive leadership of Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women and nonbinary people in Ohio. OPAWL has three regional hubs in Columbus, Cincinnati, and Cleveland as well as a statewide online community.
PENNSYLVANIA
Asian Americans United (AAU)
For more than three decades, AAU has worked in Philadelphia’s Asian American communities and in broader multiracial coalitions around quality education, youth leadership, anti-Asian violence, immigrant rights, neighborhood development, and folk arts and cultural maintenance.
RHODE ISLAND
Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM)
PrYSM organizes in Rhode Island at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation by centering youth, female, queer, and people of color leadership in our campaigns, our organization, and our communities. PrYSM mobilizes queer Southeast Asian youth, families, and allies to build grassroots power and organize collectively for social justice.
TEXAS
Woori Juntos
Woori Juntos means "We Rise together" and is to ensure Asians, immigrants, and all Texans have in-language access to health and social services and civically engage to achieve equity and justice for all. Woori Juntos approaches the community through critical social services, educational programming, community organizing, public policy advocacy and civic engagement.
VIRGINIA
Asian American Pacific Islander Civic Engagement (ACE) Collaborative
Asian American Pacific Islander Civic Engagement (ACE) Collaborative is a program started by the New Virginia Majority Education Fund. ACE members are Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Mongolians, Kashmiris, Nepalis and Vietnamese and other Asian ethnicities. Our communities face issues with accessing housing, education, health care, job instability, discrimination and racism.
Hamkae Center
Hamkae Center organizes Asian Americans to achieve social, economic, and racial justice in Virginia. Hamkae Center develops holistic programs and campaigns that are guided by community members and meet immediate needs, while building community power to make long-term systemic changes that address the root causes of these needs and center human connections.
Muslims for Just Futures (MJF)
Muslims For Just Futures (MJF) is a grassroots organization based in the DMV area that builds power in Muslim communities through collective care, organizing, advocacy, and movement-building. Muslims for Just Futures is committed to building long-term power and base-building in the region with a focus on centering working-class communities and women.
MULTIPLE STATES
Equality Labs (California, Texas, Washington)
Equality Labs is a national Dalit civil rights organization dedicated to ending caste apartheid, gender-based violence, Islamophobia, white supremacy and religious tolerance Equality Labs is an Ambedkarite South Asian power-building organization that uses community research, political base-building, culture-shifting art, and digital security.
Afghans for a Better Tomorrow (California, New York)
AFBT aims to organize the Afghan-American community to bring about systemic change in the U.S. and beyond to ensure all Afghans have lives of safety, dignity, and freedom. Since August 2021, AFBT has mobilized and led the way in coordinating evacuations for at-risk Afghans and other rapid-response efforts