A key part to sustainable organizing is making sure that we have strong leadership development and transitions at all levels of the organization: members to leaders, leaders to organizers, organizers to directors and executive directors. Organizational development and infrastructure can feel daunting, but we have so much that we can learn from one another! Vivian from APEN and Suon from PrYSM shared how the lessons their organizations have learned around leadership development and transitions.

We’re excited to announce API Civic Engagement (ACE) Collaborative, SEAC Village, AYPAL, Asian Americans United (AAU), Arab American Action Network (AAAN), and Empowering Marginalized Asian Communities (EMAC) as the recipients of our Lotus & Rice Fund!

Our Lotus and Rice Fund allows us to regrant $50,000 a year for three years to five GAR member organizations. We hope that this funding allows your organization to sustain your local organizing of working-class, Asian communities.

Earlier this week, we facilitated Building Class Solidarity, our political education workshop on contending with Right-wing forces. We shared trends we have observed amongst GAR membership about who are the emerging Right-wing forces in our Asian communities. The most effective strategy to contend with Right-wing forces is to organize working-class interests across every sector.

We are excited to announce an important moment in our journey: the launch of Grassroots Asians Rising’s “Building the Path to Working Class Power” recurring donor campaign. Our ambitious goal is to recruit 24 new sustainers who will play a pivotal role in amplifying our efforts. In the year 2024, we want to double down on the need to invest and organize beyond election to election long-term.

How can we build grassroots organizations with working-class membership bases? We’re not starting from scratch! Our movements have long histories, and with that, we’ve learned lessons from so many movement mistakes, especially when it comes to building working-class bases and leadership development processes. 

This Gathering included sessions on identifying patterns that multiple Right-wing forces share and strategizing ways to make sure we keep ourselves and our communities safe. Leaders and organizers from across the nation shared how building strong working-class, pan-Asian bases has been crucial in contending Right-wing forces in their local communities.

This month, we invited Cathy Dang, former Executive Director of CAAAV from 2013-2018 and the current National Co-Director at GAR. Cathy shared lessons from overseeing CAAAV during the upsurge of Chinese Right-Wing forces in defense of former NYPD officer Peter Liang in the killing of Akai Gurley. Conservative forces took advantage of this moment to wedge Asian communities against other communities of color on issues of police accountability and racial justice.

In 2023, GAR brought together dozens/hundreds of grassroots organizers across the country to strengthen our working-class, pan-Asian movement. With GAR’s strong infrastructure - including people like you - our member organizations are fearlessly leading and organizing to win real changes for neighborhoods, cities, and states across our nation. We’re excited to share a little more about our accomplishments in 2023. 

Following our launch of the TRANSLATED Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit into 11 Asian languages, many of our member organizations will be using this toolkit to hold rigorous, in-language workshops with their working-class memberships. But we need your support to make it happen: Donate today to our membership who are leading the way with their commitment to in-language political education. 

Last month, Grassroots Asians Rising (GAR) facilitated a discussion with our member organizations to brainstorm what resources are needed in order to reach their working-class bases and build pan-Asian solidarity for Palestine. Many GAR organizers, especially those leading East Asian and Southeast Asian organizations, are struggling to speak with their bases about what is happening in Palestine and Israel, how Zionism impedes our movements, and how we can connect the Palestinian struggle abroad to our day-to-day struggles in the US. 

We’re excited to announce the launch of the TRANSLATED Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit into 11 Asian languages, including Hindi, Nepali, Tagalog, Bangla, Korean, Hmong, Chinese, Arabic, Punjabi, Vietnamese, and Khmer!

Our movement needs resources to grow! And so, we are excited to announce that today is GAR’s launch of our 🪷 Lotus and Rice Sustainer Campaign 🌾 to recruit 20 sustainers to make an average monthly donation of $25 in order to raise $6,000. Will you join the movement by giving monthly to support this work?

A couple weeks ago, GAR held Lotus and Rice: Growing the Pan-Asian, Working-Class Ecosystem, our National Convening, in Los Angeles, CA! We brought together 32 grassroots organizations to boost our collective capacity to improve the lives of working-class pan-Asian communities across the United States.

Last month, our Co-National Director Roksana Mun was the 2023 National Education Association Board’s AAPI Observance speaker. She spoke to their community of 200+ union leaders convening for the NEA’s quarterly board meeting, including the entire NEA Board of Directors and Executive Officers from across the country.

With our expanding members, we are building a pan-Asian, working-class organizing ecosystem across the United States together. We’re excited for Woori Juntos, FAJ, CA HNSC, and HANA Center to join all our membership at our upcoming National Convening next month!

“Lotus and Rice,” the theme of our Convening, is an evolution of the popular slogan "bread for all, and roses too" which rallied the women’s and workers’ rights movements in the early 1900s. Lotus and rice are both plants found, appreciated, and eaten throughout the pan-Asian diaspora.

Recently, we invited Equality Labs, the only Dalit-led national organization organizing the Dalit diaspora in the United States and abroad, to share with other GAR members how casteism is deeply intertwined with classism. Although casteism affects at least 1.2 billion people, there is very little understanding of what it actually is and what’s at stake for the most politically, economically and socially vulnerable and oppressed groups in the South Asian diaspora.