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.

We're hiring a Special Events Contractor, Videographer, and Photographer to support us for our upcoming National Convening!

In July, we will host GAR’s 2023 National Convening for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. During this convening, we will continue to experiment and learn with organizations who are expanding safety beyond policing, building the leadership of working-class communities, and developing our skills in membership-led governance and decision-making.

Over two decades after 9/11, we are currently facing a rise of violence against Asians that have echoes of similar state and interpersonal violence. To share lessons that pan-Asian communities should be made aware of to build stronger fighting forces to combat hate violence, GAR hosted Lessons Learned Post-9/11: Combating Violence Against Asians, a peer exchange of over 50 participants, staff, members, and allies.