How are we using our collective voices and resources to address racial solidarity in action?
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June 2025
Dear AAPIPers,
To our community members living in fear right now, we see you, we stand with you, and you are not alone. Despite these difficult times, we are heartened by the profound power of communities coming together, movements mobilizing to protect each other, and people across the country demanding something different and better for all of us.
Throughout our 35th Anniversary Conference, our plenary speakers repeatedly asked the funders and nonprofit leaders in the audience: how can we unite in the name of collective liberation?
“This is all part of an organized, sustained effort to disenfranchise, to disempower and control marginalized and oppressed communities. How are we using our collective voices and resources to respond to and address racial solidarity in action?” - Akemi Kochiyama at the AAPIP 35th Anniversary Conference closing plenary: Activism & Organizing at the Intersections
“We need the resources now. If folks have funding and you're holding out right now, there might not be a tomorrow to fund. There might not be democracy to protect tomorrow.” - Antonio Gutierrez at the conference opening plenary: Chicago Solidarity on the Frontlines
How can we radically oppose systemic oppression? If not now, when? These questions drive our work as AAPIP is prepared to continue transforming the philanthropic sector and advancing its social and racial justice work. Connie Chung Joe, the outgoing CEO of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, and incoming President and CEO of AAPIP, states, “Together, we will ensure that philanthropy continues to be a force for justice and equity across all AANHPI communities.”
In Community, AAPIP
AAPIP Programs
Gratitude for the AAPIP 35th Anniversary Conference
Thank you again to all those who joined AAPIP in Chicago to honor 35 years of seeding and cultivating long-term partnerships between Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities and institutional philanthropy! If you were unable to attend (or are an attendee who would like to reminisce), we invite you to check out our conference recap to catch up on what you missed.
LAST CALL: Apply Now for our Power in Solidarity: Hawaii Fellowship!
Applications are now open for the Power in Solidarity: Hawaii Fellowship—a groundbreaking initiative designed to strengthen philanthropic investment in Native Hawaiian communities and organizations.
We seek philanthropic leaders who are:
committed to Indigenous-led solutions and community-driven change,
ready to examine and challenge organizational assumptions and biases,
prepared to advocate for more equitable funding approaches within their institutions, and
invested in building authentic relationships based on Respect, Relationships, Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Redistribution.
The Racial Equity Advancement and Defense Initiative (READI) Legal Support Fund, a fund hosted at the Tides Foundation, invites your organization to submit an application for funding to support your response to legal and/or security threats aimed at reducing or eliminating your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, racial equity, or racial justice grantmaking and/or programming. The Independent Advisory Committee (IAC) of the READI Legal Support Fund will award 10 -12 grants of up to $75,000 to eligible applicants in August 2025. Eligible applicants must meet the following criteria:
Must be a nonprofit organization with 501c3 designation by the IRS or fiscally sponsored project of a 501c3 designated organization.
Must also be experiencing a direct legal or security threat aimed at reducing or eliminating the organization's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, racial equity, or racial justice grantmaking and/or programming.
Priority will be given to eligible applicants that meet the following criteria:
Have an operating budget of $1 million or less.
Have a track record of serving communities or populations that have been historically marginalized. Historically marginalized communities include but are not limited to BIPOC communities; women, girls and femmes; LGBTQ+ communities; people with disabilities and communities/populations with intersectional identities.
If your organization meets the eligibility requirements, please submit your application on or before Monday, June 30, 2025.
Investing in an Inclusive Economy – A Funder Briefing and Community Tour
Wednesday, July 16 2:30 PM PT Briefing, 3:45 PM PT Chinatown Tour Preservation Park 1233 Preservation Park Way Oakland, CA 94612
As part of National CAPACD’s 25th Anniversary celebration, we invite you to join us in Oakland for a powerful gathering of funders, community leaders, and policy advocates who are shaping an inclusive economic future for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AA and NHPI) communities.
Why Attend?
Be the first to learn from new research by the Urban Institute on the economic well-being of AA and NHPI communities—data rarely disaggregated or discussed in philanthropic spaces.
Hear directly from a dynamic panel of frontline leaders innovating community-centered solutions to displacement, housing instability, and small business disruption.
Explore place-based impact during a guided tour of Oakland’s historic Chinatown, where you'll see firsthand the vibrant cultural and economic life that philanthropy can help sustain and protect.
Build relationships through an intimate networking reception with peers in philanthropy and coalition partners committed to equitable development.
This is more than a briefing—it’s a chance to understand how national investment strategies can be grounded in local leadership, cultural preservation, and coalition power. You’ll leave with data, stories, and partnership pathways that align with your commitment to racial and economic equity.
We hope you will join us and be part of the growing movement to ensure that AA and NHPI communities are visible, valued, and resourced in our collective vision for an inclusive economy.
Presented by National CAPACD in partnership with AAPIP. Generous sponsorship by East West Bank and US Bank.
Under Digital Siege: How Diaspora Communities Are Resisting Transnational Repression—and Why Funders Must Act
Thursday, June 26 2PM-3:30PM ET/11AM-12:30PM PT
SALDEF is hosting a funder briefing, sponsored by AAPIP and RISE Together Fund, on how transnational repression is evolving in the digital age. SALDEF's panel of community-based tech advocates will share how the digital tactics of transnational repression are evolving in real time to target the First Amendment rights of Black, African, Arab, and Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian (BAMEMSA) communities in the United States. The panel will also highlight BAMEMSA communities’ strategies and emerging needs to confront and counter transnational repression.
What Attendees Will Learn:
Emerging threat landscape: How digital TNR tactics are escalating and what frontline organizations are seeing in real-time.
Community-driven solutions: Proven approaches that BAMEMSA organizations are using to build digital resilience.
Funding gaps and opportunities: Specific areas where philanthropic investment can strengthen community capacity and infrastructure.
Strategic grantmaking insights: How to resource digital security work without inadvertently increasing surveillance of vulnerable communities.
Why This Matters for Philanthropy: Current funding approaches often miss the digital dimensions of community safety. This briefing will help funders understand how to resource comprehensive protection strategies that address both online and offline threats to civil liberties.
CAAAV’s Allied Resource Mobilization (ARM) is a five-month pilot cohort for people looking to develop skills to organize resources to movements, strengthen their political analysis and understanding of organizing, and to do it all while in trusted community with others. The cohort is especially designed for people who want to organize their own communities in support of working class immigrant tenants.
Participants will have the opportunity to:
Explore a toolkit of personal practices, tools, and political frameworks with which to understand the fight for our city and gentrifying neighborhoods all over the country
Develop clarity around the type of roles they can play in CAAAV’s donor organizing infrastructure and options of next steps
Progress in their journey of understanding their own unique role in New York City’s movement ecosystem and resource mobilization work
Build with a trusted community of fellow cohort participants and organizers to lean on as they continue to navigate their own journey through movements
In 1990, the federal government officially designated the month of May as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, expanding the original Heritage Week begun in 1978, to celebrate the contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in the United States.
While we recognize the achievements of AAPIs, we also know there are many hidden needs within the community including health and education access, food security, housing and domestic violence. In 2020, on the 30th Anniversary of AAPIHM, the Asian Pacific Fund and AAPI Data, along with community partners, Asian Pacific Community Fund, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, and Korean American Community Foundation came together to launch #GiveInMay, a nationwide giving campaign to support the work of AAPI nonprofits who provide vital services to the most vulnerable in our community.
This year, Give in May raised more than $420k in donations for over 70 AANHPI-serving nonprofits across the country. We invite you to keep uplifting the AANHPI community by giving to one or more of these amazing nonprofits. Your contribution advances housing services, AANHPIs in the arts, youth & elder care programs, healthcare access, and so much more.
AAPIP is in deep appreciation for the ongoing support from our 400+ member network who join us in supporting AANHPI people in philanthropy and working to increase the scale and impact of philanthropic resources aimed at advancing the inclusion, health, and wellbeing of AANHPI communities in the pursuit of a more just and equitable society.
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