By Quanita Toffie and  EunSook Lee
October 9, 2025 

We live in a time of monsters, and our collective imagination needs renewal. We, as Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, over twenty-six million strong, living and working in this country, must reflect on the criticality of civic participation in these times as individuals and as a community. Full participation is the antidote to division and vengeance and is how we protect and forge a multiracial democracy.  

The maelstrom with which we have had to contend during these bleak times requires us to disrupt patterns that no longer serve us or our mission. We must grow louder and utilize new tactics to be in greater support of our communities. That work begins with us. 

This Is What We Know to Be True

We are a competent and effective women-of-color-led philanthropic organization that invests in leaders and organizations that advance our multiracial democracy. 

We have strengthened compliance for ourselves and our grantees due to greater scrutiny and will not let fear influence our funding decisions. We support groups across the country—from the East Coast to the West Coast, including the South, Southwest, Midwest, and Pacific Northwest. They reach all members of our community, representing 50 ethnicities in dozens of languages with services and programs ranging from affordable childcare to climate justice. Ninety percent of the groups we support are led by Asian American and Pacific Islander women. 

We are grieving like never before, and it is incumbent on us to speak against the harms that our family, friends, and neighbors are experiencing. 

This is a war on the humanity of us all, and it requires newfangled defensive and offensive strategies. This means responding rapidly while strengthening our capacity and breaking through silos to construct fresh new multiracial and multi-sectoral alliances.

AAPI leaders and organizations cannot tacitly legitimize the hate and monsters around us by obfuscating this devastation with milquetoast activities or performative gestures.

We must lock arms with the most vilified members of our larger community with a full-throated approach now and not just when we feel safe and protected. Strong leadership is the first step—and a step we can all take—towards bringing our communities and country together.

The AAPI civic engagement ecosystem and the wider social justice sector are overwhelmed and under-resourced.

More than ever, this is not a time for retrenchment, and we seek to deepen our support by aggressively exploring new ways to close the $2MM gap we currently face. We will not hide what we do, and we will oppose efforts to erase the existence of our communities. We will share more of our worldview and why we do the work we do. We will experiment and stretch our creativity to positively shape the current narrative. We aim to speak up clearly and prominently because we know that the local groups we support along with the work that they do offer hope to our community. 

Hopeful Work

One of our newest grantees, South Asian American Coalition to Renew Democracy (SACRED), builds multiracial, multifaith alliances in Illinois to counter rising religious nationalism. SACRED exposes the link between domestic and global authoritarianism and organizes communities to advocate against hate-filled agendas and to dismantle the ties between far-right Hindu supremacist groups and White supremacist groups. Recently, they revealed that the anti-democratic South Asian American actor Hindu American Foundation (HAF) regularly misclassifies anti-Asian racism, anti-Muslim violence, and criticism of Hindu nationalism as anti-Hindu hate, stoking disunity within the South Asian/Asian American community. Read more about these findings in the article written by Mukta Joshi, here. SACRED also hosted a meaningful exchange with Chicago Votes through a trip to India to learn about the roots of non-violence and pacifism, experiencing the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.  

AAPI groups across the country, from Little Tokyo to Atlanta, are speaking up against the policies that endanger the fundamental rights and safety of our communities.

• This past August, Little Tokyo Service Center (LTSC) issued a statement in response to armed Customs and Border Patrol agents at the Japanese American National Museum’s Norman Y. Mineta Democracy Plaza. The Little Tokyo Rapid Response Network reported that at least one person was detained. In seeing parallels to the Japanese Americans experience during WWII, LTSC recognizes its moral obligation to turn out community members to raise the alarm and speak up against ramped up enforcement activities that are disproportionately harming the Latino community today.
• Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta (AAAJ-ATL) was featured in the New York Times and Democracy Now in response to the recent ICE raids at the Hyundai plant in Savannah. AAAJ-ATL has been providing immigration legal intake and Know Your Rights information to detainees and other community members in the area. 
• After Phillips 66 announced its refinery in Los Angeles would close at the end of 2025, Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) organized residents to demand accountability through a taskforce due to the impact on air quality and poor health outcomes for fenceline communities in Carson and Wilmington. Carson’s city council responded by voting unanimously to create this taskforce, which, for APEN members and allies, means that worker protections and proper cleanup will be implemented. 
• New Virginia Majority Education Fund (NVM EF) is collaborating with SEIU to educate and mobilize working families to protect access to healthcare for over 350,000 Virginians.

Despite widespread efforts to promote worn out tropes about AAPI non-participation that serve to keep our communities needs and contributions invisible, the work of artists in our community give texture to our experiences, makes visible our contributions, and assert our humanity.2024 Creative Catalyst Fellow, Safwat Saleem announced the opening of his solo exhibition, The Unrequited Love Institute (T.U.L.I.) at the Phoenix Art Museum which is on view through January 2026. Saleem’s project, Anxieties of an Immigrant Father, produced during the 2024 AAPI Fund’s Creative Catalyst Fellowship, is included in the exhibition.  

The 2025 Creative Catalyst fellows gathered this past July in Philadelphia, PA and connected with Asian Americans United and the Asian American Community Fund of PA, to learn about the recent “No Arena in Chinatown Campaign,” which brought together a coalition of organizations to halt the construction of a stadium that would have impacted Philadelphia’s historic Chinatown. This recent victory is part of a long history of community-led efforts to preserve the vibrant local neighborhoods. We are hopeful that these opportunities will be mutually inspirational for organizers and artists alike.