Asian Americans United

See schedule o to best meet the needs of our community, aau relearned how to come together in person after covid. Aau's civc engagement (ce) team led the way by: continuing to provide reliable and language accessible resources to the community including covid vaccination information; and worker protection information as well as distributing worker relief funds to workers experiencing hardship. They held vaccination clinics to directly provide vaccinations and boosters as well as shared information about clinics held at 4 other partner organizations. The ce team worked to promote active citizenship by hosting citizenship clinics, screened people for citizenship and green card, n-400, i-90, and i-912 applications, reviewed and referred eligible candidates to our legal partners for additional assistance. They also worked to engage community members who were already citizens by hosting voter registration events in chinatown and throughout the city. They conducted get out the vote events including phone banking, text banking, door knocking and mailings to encourage people to vote and for the first time ever in 2022, because of section 203 eligibility, voting materials were required to be available in chinese in philadelphia. This was a direct result of pushing so hard for participation in the 2020 census. Because chinese language access was new to the city, the team clostely monitored polling places during the primary and pushed for many changes based on their findings. Their efforts were successful and poll monitoring of the 2022 general election showed that significant improvements had been made. As aau served our community base, aau also worked to provide a collective voice and constructive means of contending with the rising incidents of anti-asian violence threatening our community. Aau convened Asian american leaders and community members to heal and grow from these individual and communal events of violence and distilled the learnings into a study released in the summer for others to utilize and adapt as needed. Aau recognizes that healing takes time and that building spaces for people to connect, nurture the next generation while learning from the experience of elders, and valuing and celebrating cultural heritage to bridge divides between generations, ethnicities, and languages is transformative and regenerating. Towards that end, aau continued to work on our equitable development issues including working in coalition to secure land from the city's land bank for community use at 800 vine street which was disappointingly declined by the city. Instead, we learned that 76devcorp proposed to build a new basketball arena in chinatown that would irrevocably displace the community. Since the arena pronouncement, aau has been working to build, organize, and lead a coalition to stop the 76devcorp proposal that threatens the cultural and economic survival of the city's oldest Asian american community hub. In addition to protecting our community, aau also worked to preserve and celebrate our culture and nurture our next generation of leaders. Through our youth intern program: youths created a podcast highlighting stories about Asian american women organizing in philadelphia; facilitated meetings and brought the inch-by-inch garden to life in the spring, by starting and sowing seeds of plants used in community cooking and sharing the harvest; co-organized the our city our school youth summit with other youth across the city and facilitated a workshop on restorative justice; testified in front of city council and the board of education; and wrote an op-ed about what safety looks like for Asian american youth in the city. The chinese youth organizing project (cyop) held in-person meetings and workshops through the school year providing safe spaces for immigrant youth to explore issues important to them; aau summer and cyop summer youth surveyed nearly 700 people about how the 800 vine st. public parcel could be used to benefit the community and published their findings. In the fall, youth worked to inform businesses about the 76 arena proposal and held info. Sessions for other youth throughout the city. And last but not least, over 250 youth volunteered to staff our 27th annual mid-autumn festival which was fully in-person and featured performances, arts activities, carnival games, resource information and culminated with our lantern parade.