Voices + Evidence: What’s Moving the Needle (Vol. 2, No. 4)

By Crissy Chung

The Shift | Vol. 2, No. 4 – Blueprints for What Works

The Work Behind the Heritage: Building Movement With AANHPI Communities

A more equitable economy and society is not built through vision alone, but through models of resilience and solidarity that hold up under real-world conditions. Every May, the United States observes AANHPI Heritage Month to highlight the contributions, accomplishments, and presence of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities across the nation. Yet in this framing, many of the conditions that made the month possible go understated: the stories of community solidarity and the deeply intertwined history of Black-led civil rights movements. The term "Asian American" itself did not begin as a demographic category, but as political resistance to the word "Oriental," a term that perpetuated the idea of the "forever foreigner" and carried racist, colonialist connotations. While it began as an act of resistance and political activism toward greater equality, it has also become a blanket term that can overshadow the lived experiences, stories, and truths of the very communities it covers but does not always represent. Building any practice or blueprint for organizing AANHPI communities must therefore acknowledge that "serving AANHPI" is not meaningful without specifying which communities are being reached and which interests are being aligned. This article draws on the Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit to surface the themes of intersectionality and solidarity, principles that matter to any movement, but that are truly the building blocks and non-negotiables for building one with and for AANHPI communities.

Start From Lived Experience, Not Assumptions

Any movement that hopes to last has to begin where people actually are. Although this might  sound obvious, oftentimes, it becomes the step most often skipped. It is far easier to organize around an idea of a community than around the community itself, and easier still to reach for the data that flatters rather than the data that complicates. For AANHPI communities, that temptation has a name: the model minority myth. The myth presents Asian Americans as uniformly educated, prosperous, and untroubled, and in doing so, it accomplishes two things at once: erasure and separative thinking. It erases the poverty, precarity, and struggle that exist within these communities, and it positions the AANHPI community against one another and also other communities of color by holding them up as proof that the system already works. A movement built on a myth is not a movement– it undermines both opportunities for solidarity and the intersectional work needed to generate change. Understanding lived experience means resisting the aggregate. The story of a highly paid tech worker and the story of a refugee facing deportation are both AANHPI stories, but they are not the same story, and a single program designed for "the AANHPI community" will almost always serve the first and miss the second. Resources like the Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit, built collaboratively by fifteen grassroots organizations, are valuable here precisely because they insist on starting from the specific: the tenant facing eviction, the undocumented young person, the worker owed stolen wages. Before a movement decides what it wants, it has to know, in concrete and disaggregated terms, who it is for and who it will affect. 

Intersectionality Is a Design Requirement

Once a movement starts from lived experience, intersectionality stops being an abstraction and becomes unavoidable. People do not experience race on Monday, religion on Tuesday, and immigration status on Wednesday. Those forces arrive together, often compounded. A woman who is a low-wage worker, a mother, and is also queer, is not facing four separate problems that can be solved with four different approaches. When organizing is designed around its most precarious members, including refugees, undocumented people, low-wage workers, women and girls, queer and trans community members, it ends up broad enough to hold everyone. Intersectionality is not only about supporting these members, but also about choosing whose experience sets the floor for whom the movement must advocate and fight for. 

Solidarity Is Built on Difference, and Community Holds It Together

It is important to remember that the very term "Asian American" was a political act, and the movement that coined it was forged inside the longer struggle for Black freedom. The Asian American movement emerged one year after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Riverside Church address against the Vietnam War. Much of the political language, legal protections, and imagination available to AANHPI organizers today exist because Black-led movements built them first, often at enormous cost. To organize AANHPI communities without acknowledging that inheritance is to misunderstand where the work comes from, and doing so may cause more harm than good. 

It is also important to acknowledge that solidarity is not the claim that everyone's struggle is the same. It is the harder commitment to stand together while being honest that histories, risks, and circumstances differ. Anti-Blackness and colorism exist within AANHPI communities, carried across borders and reinforced by the pull of assimilation and terms like “the model minority.” It is critical to name these dynamics to ensure trust and sustainability of a movement. A movement is not a campaign or a season of attention; it is a set of relationships strong enough to outlast a single moment. This is why a community cannot be treated as an audience to be reached, but must be seen as the people doing the building. The most lasting organizing closes the distance between the organizer and the organized until there is no meaningful separation between them. 

Building Forward

AANHPI Heritage Month is observed as a celebration of presence and contribution, but presence is the visible surface of something deeper: a long inheritance of communities that organized across difference, in solidarity with others, to make more room than they were given. Solidarity, community, intersectionality, and a genuine connection to lived experience are key structures beneath every story and movement that makes AANHPI Heritage Month possible.

If the goal is a more equitable economy and just society, then the movement that gets us there has to be built deliberately, from the ground we actually stand on. Much of that blueprint already exists in the practice of communities that have been doing this work for generations. The task in any meaningful movement is not to reinvent the blueprint, but to learn from, and honor the communities who brought us here, while upholding the solidarity and intention that makes the work possible.

Resources: https://www.apalanet.org/uploads/8/3/2/0/83203568/asian_american_racial_justice_toolkit.pdf 

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Crissy Chung is the Head of Insights, Research and Evaluation at LeadersUp, driving our research initiatives and insights collection strategies.