In the face of escalating attacks on immigrant communities, the need for robust rapid response systems has never been more urgent. Recently, PrYSM (Providence Youth Student Movement) and AARW (Asian American Resource Workshop) shared their hard-earned lessons and strategies for building rapid response systems that support grassroots organizing and membership growth.

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.

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 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.