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“Rooted in Movement” Series # 5:
Reflecting on MinKwon's 20+ Years of Civic Empowerment Work for AAPIs and Immigrants

Dear Supporters,

Our anniversary virtual gala is coming up! This year, we’re dedicating our gala theme to being “Rooted in Movement” (커뮤니티 운동 뿌리를 내린다), to pay homage to our organizational principle of “Know Your Roots” (뿌리를 알자) and a year of building with our communities despite a tough political climate for immigrants and low-income families.  Leading up to our gala, we’re hoping to highlight our key program areas and projects, share our major accomplishments, and explain why our work is “Rooted in Movement”.

If you've missed it, here are our previous program highlights!

Support our anniversary gala by becoming a sponsor or purchasing tickets!

For the past 20 years, MinKwon’s Civic Participation Program has been a core part of our strategy for building power for immigrant rights. Since our program’s founding, we’ve worked to increase the civic participation rates of AAPI and immigrant New Yorkers, particularly among limited English proficient immigrants and low propensity voters. We accomplish this through six non-partisan, comprehensive efforts -- voter registration, research, education, mobilization, assistance, and protection.

We take great pride in the work we’ve been able to accomplish over last two decades - we are one of the first grassroots AAPI organizations in NYC to initiate large-scale phone banking and door knocking efforts to increase the civic participation rates of limited English-proficient and low-propensity AAPI voters." Since the early 2000s, we’ve made on average contact with over 50,000 Korean, Asian, and immigrant voters during each election cycle (that's over 1 million cumulative voter contacts since our program's inception!), and to date have directly registered over 95,000 new Korean, Asian, and immigrant voters.

“We are one of the first grassroots AAPI organizations in NYC to initiate large-scale GOTV phone banking and door knocking efforts to increase the civic participation rates of limited English Proficient and low-propensity AAPI voters.”
Every year, we treat our grassroots voter outreach and engagement work as not just an effort to remind registered voters to vote. We use this opportunity to hold conversations with our community on what issues are important to them, and a chance to share what issues the MinKwon Center is currently working on. These “check-ins” have helped build our understanding of the realities and issues our community members face, many of whom currently receive assistance through our Social Services, and/or became naturalized through our Immigration Legal Services. This informs our priorities and campaigns.

While the COVID-19 pandemic forced most of our engagement work in the past couple of years to revolve around phone conversations and online mediums, our voter engagement work emphasizes and values the time we spend in-person with our communities. This proved to be valuable, as we were able to meld our pandemic response work with our voter engagement work, particularly with community members who were older and not accustomed to new technologies.

Building Grassroots AAPI Civic Engagement Capacity through the APA VOICE Coalition

Founded in 2011, the Asian American Community Coalition on Redistricting and Democracy (ACCORD), was the first-ever pan-Asian coalition in NYC to advocate for a fair and inclusive redistricting process and was the predecessor to the current APA VOICE coalition.

MinKwon has not only focused on building our own civic participation capacity. As a movement-building organization, we have been a key player in building grassroots AAPI civic participation capacity with our peer organizations in NYC since 2010, originally through the Asian American Community Coalition on Redistricting and Democracy (ACCORD) - the first-ever pan-Asian coalition to advocate for a fair and inclusive redistricting process. Our collective advocacy work helped identify and create an AAPI minority-influence districts in several NYC council districts and NYS Senate/Assembly districts, and NY Congressional District 6, which later that year elected the first Asian American US Representative on the East Coast.

In 2013, ACCORD members wanted to continue the civic engagement work with the existing partnerships and relationships that were formed, and committed to continue working together on voter and civic engagement. With preparation conducted in 2014, the collaborators of ACCORD convened for its first retreat in February 2015.  This retreat resulted in the founding of Asian Pacific Americans Voting & Organizing to Increase Civic Engagement (APA VOICE), with the creation of the coalition’s mission, internal structure and subcommittees, strategic plans, and key objectives.

"As a movement-building organization, MinKwon has been a key player in building grassroots AAPI civic participation capacity with our peer organizations in NYC since 2011"
Today, APA VOICE has expanded its coalition from its original 15 member organizations to 22 member organizations strong, and increased the institutional knowledge and expertise of civic participation among AAPIs particularly in NYC. Collectively as a coalition, we have directly coordinated outreach operations to make on average 200,000 direct AAPI voter contacts per year. APA VOICE has some of the most comprehensive, well attended and successful civic participation activities in NYC, from borough and citywide candidate forums, Census outreach activities, multi-language voter education drives, grassroots GOTV outreach trainings, issue-based voter pledges, and exit polling.

Earlier this year, we’ve released a report on AAPI voter participation rates in NYC primaries between 2013 and 2021, which is a very important measure given that NYC elections are predominantly decided in Democratic primaries. In the period that APA VOICE has existed from 2015 to 2021, we’ve collectively registered over 100,000 new immigrant voters in NYC, and have increased AAPI voter participation rates by 350%. The MinKwon Center and APA VOICE Coalition can confidently say that we've made a direct and oversized contribution to this increase due to our targeted and accessible grassroots voter education and mobilization efforts, particularly amongst limited English-proficient AAPI immigrants, and being the only grassroots and non-partisan AAPI GOTV effort that was active during this period of time.
"Initially, before 2013, before APA VOICE, it was just advocacy organizations conducting outreach at a higher level and doing advertisements, conducting a few outreach events here and there, which didn't have much of an impact. When CBOs [CommunityBased Organizations] were working directly with the community, who provide services, when they started talking directly with community about elections, city council, candidate forums, that started creating a real impact because the community knows these are the people who have been helping us with benefits, SNAP, immigration, etc. so we know when they are organizing us, they know we need to do this, get it done. People who are eligible to become citizens become citizens, able to vote, and we are able to create champions within the community."

- APA VOICE Coalition Member

Redistricting is a Critical Part of the Civic Participation Process

Redistricting is a process that happens only once every decade and decides how an entire generation selects its representatives. Whether or not communities are kept together during this time will impact how well it advocates for its issues and resource allocations.

This year, the process of redistricting faced many twists and turns with the responsibility of drawing political boundaries for the State Senate and House of Representatives ultimately ending up with a court appointed “Special Master”. Through the APA VOICE Redistricting Task Force, we were vigilant in ensuring our AAPI community voices were head.
 We engaged in one of the most comprehensive community education and mobilization campaigns on redistricting this past year.  We even traveled to the Village of Bath, seven hours from NYC, to testify in Steuben County Supreme Court and make a case for why Flushing must be preserved on the maps.

Our most notable accomplishment is that our public advocacy work has shed light on a process that traditionally happens behind closed doors, and not transparent to the communities affected. To date, our work has generated 66 cumulative articles on English-language media, and 62 articles in Asian-ethnic media. This in addition to the multitude of community engagement activities the task force has organized - including town halls, car tours, meetings with elected officials, and social media activities.

APA VOICE also made concerted efforts to work with other communities of color to advocate for collectively agreed upon Unity Maps, demonstrating our ability to work with and build alliances beyond traditional Korean and Asian American community settings. This level of sophistication and expertise on map construction and coordination by grassroots community-based organizations based in immigrant communities is unheard of in the country.
"...Our public advocacy work has shed light on a process that traditionally happens behind closed doors not transparent to the communities affected"

Our City, Our Vote - The Time is Now

MinKwon participates in a press conference along with other grassroots community-based organizations (including New Immigrant Community Empowerment and Asian Americans for Equality) in the early 2000s advocating for non-citizen voting in municipal elections.
Earlier this year, NYC passed the historic "Our City, Our Vote" legislation, something that MinKwon has been fighting for over two decades as a part of our immigrant rights work and mission to politically empower the broader immigrant community. However, this legislation is currently in the courts, due to a lawsuit initiated by Republican City Council Members. 

If implemented, it would empower over 800,000 immigrant New Yorkers (90,000 of whom are AAPIs) to participate for the first time in any U.S. based election, despite many having lived decades in the U.S., paying taxes, and contributing to the economy. MinKwon will continue to be in the forefront of this fight, and work to engage our community members, both registered voters and those that stand to be empowered through this legislation, to fight for the implementation of this legislation.
MinKwon with other member organizations of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) at the Staten Island court hearing for Our City, Our Vote.
In reflecting on our over 20 years of Civic Empowerment Work, we understand that our work is rooted in a fight to overcome long-term structural barriers that are in place for our community to participate in the political process. Voter suppression goes beyond the form of language barriers and the lack of information, but inequalities stemming from many of our community members being in constant survival mode, working jobs in homecare, nail salons as well as other service industry positions while living in unsafe or insecure housing situations, all in the midst of recovering economically and emotionally from the pandemic. It’s in this context we are attempting to build an active civic culture within our community and elevate their voice in circles of power.

Despite these structural barriers, we've developed a civic participation model that has demonstrably scaled up AAPI civic participation in NYC working with the hardest to reach voters, and built up grassroots AAPI political power from the bottom up. MinKwon through the APA VOICE Coalition has built up the sophistication and infrastructure that is effective, comprehensive, and sets the standard for what peer to peer coalition-building can and should look like. We hope to continue that role for years to come.

Help us remain “Rooted in Movement” by supporting our anniversary gala by becoming a sponsor or purchasing tickets!

133-29 41st Avenue, Suite 202, Flushing, NY 11355
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