Category: Social Justice and Economic Opportunity

In 2018, NationSwell inspired Council member Lauren Baer, a former senior policy advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, to run for U.S. Congress in her home state of Florida. Her victory would have made history: Baer would’ve served as the first openly queer person to represent Florida in Washington. Following a narrow defeat, she’s now Managing Partner for Arena, focusing on supporting the next generation of women, BIPOC, and queer politicians on how to organize across the political spectrum and win seats on the federal and state level.

Following the news that the Supreme Court will likely overturn Roe v. Wade’s decades-spanning federal abortion rights protections in June, and that other civil liberties like same-sex marriage might be in jeopardy, I spoke with Baer to get her unique perspective on this unprecedented moment in our nation’s history.

This is what she had to say.

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NationSwell: Thank you so much for speaking with us, Lauren. Please tell us about your professional journey.

Lauren Baer: My personal journey over the last five years is one of political activation and civic engagement. Earlier in my career, I had been a practicing lawyer, and then a foreign policy official in the Obama administration for six years. But in October of 2016, I gave birth to a baby girl, and two weeks later, Donald Trump was elected president. For me, that led to a very deep questioning of how I could have the most impact in our world — how I could create the kind of world I wanted my daughter to live in at a time where I saw our own democracy in the United States very much under threat.

And so what grew out of that for me was a move from the world of policy to politics. I returned to my home state of Florida and ran for office there — in 2018, I was the democratic nominee for US Congress in Florida’s 18th District. And although I narrowly lost that race, I knew afterwards that I needed to stay on the front lines in the fight to preserve and protect our democracy and all of the rights that we hold so dear.

So for the last 14 months, I have been managing partner at an organization called Arena. Our mission is to convene, train, and support the next generation of Democratic candidates and campaign staff. And what we see our job as is essentially building and diversifying the talent pipeline into politics, so that it is more representative of our party as a whole, more representative of the country as a whole, and therefore more effective at waging these battles that we’re fighting today — not only on the federal level, but in all 50 states.

NationSwell: How does Arena do that?

Baer: There are four key components of our work, and the first component is training. Our flagship program is called Arena Academy and we’ve trained more than 6,200 campaign staffers and volunteers since 2019 — the majority of them women, the majority of them people of color, and more than 30% LGBTQ+.

We train these individuals on all of the different types of work that are necessary to run Democratic campaigns and work in movement organizations. But we don’t stop there. We have a team, our Arena Careers team, that works to place these individuals on Democratic campaigns and with Democratic and progressive organizations so that they can be carrying on the fight in all 50 states. 

We also have a suite of free downloadable campaign tools that can be accessed by campaign staff and candidates alike in order to help them build effective operations. Those tools have been downloaded more than 40,000 times at this point.

Lastly, we support the next generation of new and diverse candidates running for office by taking individuals we’ve trained, placing them on what we consider to be the most critical races around the country, and fully funding their salaries and healthcare. This ensures that these individuals who are running for office have the capacity that they need in order to run good races and win.

And here I want to emphasize that our focus since the 2020 election cycle has been on state legislative races because we recognize that state legislatures control some of the most important things that touch individuals’ day to day lives. You look across the country at legislation from Florida’s, “Don’t Say Gay” bill, to SB-8 restricting abortion in Texas, to the dozens upon dozens of laws that have been proposed and enacted limiting voting rights. We know that control of state legislatures is absolutely critical to preserving our democratic freedoms. And so we’re placing a real emphasis on supporting those down ballot candidates who are ultimately going to determine who has control at the state level and therefore the rights that most Americans enjoy.

NationSwell: As you train organizers, what messaging have you found works in building bridges to talk about abortion rights? How do you bring more conservative voices to the table here?

On abortion rights, we actually know from polling that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that abortion is a constitutional right and that individuals should have safe and legal access to abortion. So that does not need to be a partisan issue. In fact, there is overwhelming bipartisan support. And so what I find effective to do there is actually to point out ways in which the Supreme Court and the Republican party are being anti-democratic in their actions. Even in so-called red states, there is support for abortion rights from both Democrats and Republicans.

More broadly, on issues where Americans do agree, we need to put aside the partisan labels and talk about these issues as issues. And we need to question our leaders as to why, when there’s such agreement, there isn’t action in the direction that the majority of Americans want.

NationSwell: The Supreme Court confirmed yesterday that the document was authentic. If the draft opinion holds, what does this mean for women? What does this mean for queer people? And what does this mean for people of color in this country?

Baer: So this is nothing less than an all-out assault on fundamental reproductive freedoms that are enshrined in the United States constitution. If that draft opinion holds, or if anything close to that draft opinion holds, what we know is that tens of millions of individuals in our country will be denied access to abortions, that this will disproportionately affect women of color, and that our daughters will be growing up with fewer rights than we were raised with. It’s a very scary time.

What we also know is that the writing was on the wall for this. Arena recognized prior to when Texas passed the SB-8 law, which at the time was the most restrictive abortion ban in the country, that this was going to be a huge issue this election year, and that even if the Supreme Court didn’t take action, that in states around the country, there was going to be an emphasis on trying to restrict reproductive freedoms.

This is precisely the reason that we are so heavily invested in Texas this cycle, including our upcoming Arena Summit in Austin, Texas, which is taking place June 11th and 12th. There, we will be convening reproductive rights leaders from across the state, along with other activists, elected officials, and change-makers to strategize about the path forward.

Our work we see as absolutely integral to protecting civil liberties because we know that they can be restricted in so many ways by state legislatures. And so our work to ensure that we have Democratic and progressive majorities at the state level is at its core work to ensure that we are protecting reproductive freedoms, that we are protecting voting rights, that we are protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals, that we’re paying actual attention to climate change and gun safety and the like. Because we know as we’ve seen in the legislative record this year, that when Republicans have the majority, they have no qualms about taking these things away.

So the first component of our work, working to elect the right people in the right places, is our number one safeguard in terms of protecting rights. But beyond that, Arena organizes large convenings like the Arena Summit in Austin, Texas, that I mentioned, to provide a space for individuals who are working on the front lines to protect our civil liberties to gather together, to share ideas, to strategize, to chart a path forward. Because we know that if we are going to win these battles, if we are going to effectively fight back, we have to be working effectively together. And we need spaces where people can come together and do that work.

NationSwell: As a queer person, did Alito’s draft opinion trouble you about what other civil liberties might be in peril?

Baer: I think the draft opinion is an incredibly troubling harbinger of numerous negative decisions that could be handed down by the Supreme Court. We are fooling ourselves if we do not think right now that LGBTQ+ rights are on the line, that our right to contraception, our right to privacy, our right to consensual sexual relations are all on the line.

Justice Alito made very clear that he had in his sight decisions like Obergefell, which guaranteed a constitutional right to same sex marriage decisions; like Lawrence v. Texas, which protected same-sex relationships; decisions like Griswold — going back decades — which ensured access to contraception. So this is no longer hypothetical. This is about a very clear path that the court is charting to roll back constitutional rights that have been taken as sacrosanct for decades. And we therefore, as a country, have to treat this moment with the urgency that it requires. At Arena, we are not sitting back. We know that this is a moment to train people, to organize, to fight all over this country, because it is not a given at this point that our rights will endure or that our democracy will endure. So we all have to be in it together.

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The NationSwell Council is a non-partisan community bringing together a diverse, curated community of bold individuals and organizations leading the way in social, economic, and environmental problem-solving. Learn more about the Council here.

We often hear that the United States is a “nation of immigrants,” but this notion doesn’t reflect the realities of either our national discourse or federal immigration policy.

In his new book, “Crossing Borders: The Reconciliation of a Nation of Immigrants,” Ali Noorani, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum, explores the recent history and current landscape of U.S. immigration policy through the stories of immigrants themselves.

In a recent Council event with NationSwell, Ali joined us to discuss his book, the rise of certain anti-immigration narratives — particularly on the far-right — what can be done to change these narratives, and what steps must be taken on a federal and local policy level to truly make it possible for immigrants and refugees to flourish.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the event.

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Change is most effective when it comes from within

It’s extremely difficult to change somebody’s social and political views as an outsider. This can be especially true of issues, such as immigration, that large media companies like Fox News have a vested interest in shaping. But there are groups of conservatives who have broken from the narratives around immigration that are being pushed, and they have the best chance of affecting change in their own circles.

This is not to say that liberals and progressives are powerless to move the needle. The key, however, is for them to focus their energy on smaller scale outreach, as fact checking and scolding far-right media narratives has little practical effect.

We must make an effort to understand the fears of those who hold anti-immigrant views

Those who oppose immigration typically have a common set of fears: Culture, security, and economy. However wrongheaded or inaccurate these fears may be, if an attempt isn’t made to understand them, then the work of changing the minds of those who hold them becomes exponentially more difficult. When people feel their concerns are being dismissed outright, they are much less likely to want to be part of a dialogue.

What can we take away from the situation in Ukraine?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in one of the largest and fastest mass migrations since World War II. Attitudes towards Ukrainians fleeing their country are generally positive, but rather than dwell on the disparity between how they are looked upon favorably while, for example, Central and South American migrants have often been demonized, we should use this opportunity to reshape our national immigration policy. The United States can use both the war in Ukraine and the recent influx of Afghan refugees to make permanent changes to its immigration policy and restore its gutted resettlement infrastructure.

What are some steps that still need to be taken to help immigrants and their children succeed in the U.S.?

Education is a key tool in this effort. Our schools must do better at even the basics of teaching about immigration so that non-immigrant students can better understand what their classmates or possibly classmates’ parents have gone through. Educators must also be provided with access to professional development so that they can better teach immigrant students. Immigrant families must also be provided with the basic infrastructure to succeed in the U.S. economy, such as access to the naturalization process through their employers, English classes if needed, and assistance obtaining necessary licenses to open businesses.

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The NationSwell Council community brings together a diverse, curated community of bold individuals and organizations leading the way in social, economic, and environmental problem-solving. Learn more about the Council here.

In an ideal situation, MLE can help to drive social impact and question deeply-held, outmoded foundational beliefs, helping organizations to stay agile and adapt to new challenges so that they can align around key outcomes that serve their mission statements. But the practices on their own have limitations: Without viewing evaluative work through the lens of equity, we run the risk of using the insights we glean to accidentally strengthen the systemic and structural barriers that already exist and limit possibilities for marginalized communities.

In the aftermath of the event, NationSwell asked the three panelists — Dr. Albertina Lopez of the Center for Evaluation Innovation, Dr. Daniela Pineda of Informed Insight, and Dr. Amber Banks of the Center for Trust and Transformation — to go deeper on how organizations can meaningfully track change at the systemic level and build trust within their communities through compassionate, equitable MLE practices.

Below are some key insights from the panelists:

NationSwell: Why do you think MLE is important for change-making work?

Dr. Albertina Lopez, senior associate the the Center for Evaluation Innovation: Evaluation is a problem-solving tool, and problem solving is necessary for change-making work. Evaluation — with the quantitative and qualitative measuring that goes with it — helps us learn in a systematic and intentional way rather than defaulting to the natural, biased way our brain works, which is generally to bring in information that is aligned with our existing beliefs and to reject that which is not — things like confirmation bias. Evaluation can help us to see a more expansive set of strategies so that we can select those that meet the demands of justice. We can use evaluation to unpack answers to questions like, “To what extent does our work align with how the community defines the problems and solutions?” in order to help us plan for forward-facing, strategic questions like, “How can we devote more resources in 2022 to the racial and gender justice work that communities are leading in the places we touch?”

Dr. Amber Banks, founder and CEO of the Center for Trust and Transformation: Reflective practices are critical for social change. The essence of measurement, learning, and evaluation activities is to create space to understand whether we are making progress toward our goals. Learning and evaluation can help change-makers determine if their efforts are having the desired impact and adjust course to either accelerate or enhance impact. Justice requires an evolution of the field/practice of evaluation as well. Evaluation must also shift toward asset based frames that honor the truth and abundance of who are most impacted by injustices not centered around those already in power. Accountability that centers on the responsibility of institutions to evolve toward more liberatory practices is critical.

Dr. Daniela Pineda, founder of Informed Insight and Lead for the Social and Economic Justice Research Collaborative: Whether you are working on a data dashboard, facilitating a learning session, or conducting an evaluation, MLE tools and practices are  powerful resources for helping us all to keep each other accountable. They clarify problems and help to define what success looks like.

When we are in the midst of “doing the work,” taking time to collect data or participating in an evaluation can feel like a luxury we don’t have. But I urge you to think again. MLE tools can be used to tell our stories, quantify and describe systemic inequities, and describe success. We cannot afford to skip out on these activities. Being able to name the changes we seek is powerful because it helps to focus on what matters.

NS: What does it look like to practice MLE in a way that serves equity and justice?

LOPEZ: At the Center for Evaluation Innovation, we partner with philanthropy on strategy, learning, and evaluation efforts to advance racial equity and justice. We largely work with people who are advancing policy and system changes, and so are practicing the use of evaluation to contest power and to help move it to those who have been historically oppressed by structural racism. What this looks like in practice is applying the Equitable Evaluation Framework™ principles in how we plan and implement the work and using the power-building framework to narrow in on what we evaluate.

BANKS: When we think of MLE we think about processes and methodologies but the most important part of learning and evaluation is relationships. Centering relationships can provide a foundation for listening, co-creation, shared ownership, and trust building. It is also important to honor the negative experiences many communities/individuals have had with evaluation being an extractive, punitive process. Intentionally designing and implementing humanizing approaches that are rooted in asset based frames and create opportunities for multiple voices and perspectives are critical for equity and justice. Ultimately, generative learning is grounded in trust and an ability to be vulnerable with what is working and not working. It also requires acknowledging that evaluation/data has been used historically to harm communities of color and communities impacted by poverty. Serving equity and justice means upending the power imbalances in evaluation and expanding the invitation to co-creation, multiple truths, and a re-orientation around the purpose and value of learning for impact.

PINEDA: The good news here is that there is not a manual or a single toolkit that will tell you how to ‘do’ equitable MLE. And the even better news is that there are so many entry points for any of us to use MEL tools and practices to serve equity and justice.

In my practice I have had the privilege of working with organizations that are taking steps to make their evaluation practice  more equitable.  Centering equity and justice is about our values as practitioners, the way in which we partner with others, and what we want to accomplish with those partnerships. I have partnered with organizations that have gone back to the drawing board to discuss what they mean by community engagement. Serving equity in those conversations was as much about being realistic about what type of input they were seeking from community partners as much as it was about facing their internal barriers to sharing control with community members. As a learning partner, I’ve designed processes that account for power dynamics, build input from different types of experts, and shine a light on how the myth of objectivity can privilege research methods that at worst reify structural inequities. All of this work is ongoing because serving equity is not like flipping a switch; it is a practice.

NS: What is your vision for the future of MLE?

LOPEZ: My vision is justice. Justice is why we measure, evaluate, and learn, and how we work. What does it look like to have justice as both principle and standard? First, we need to know what justice is. The Oxford Dictionary states that it is the “maintenance of what is just or right by the exercise of authority or power; assignment of deserved reward or punishment; giving of due deserts.” So, if we are to serve justice, then we must know what power we have to exercise so we can meet its demands. We can look at our power positionally (e.g., what influence does your organizational role give you?) and personally (e.g., what skills and relationships do you have?). Once we have an idea of what our power is, we may wonder when to use it and how to do so in the complex, unique situations we encounter daily as change-makers. Love is the way. Justice requires love, as I learned from the influential moral philosopher Paul Tillich in his book, “Love, Power and Justice.” This means we are using our positional and personal power lovingly by, as bell hooks proclaims in her book “All About Love: New Visions”: “… mix[ing] various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.” In our future, MLE is serving justice and we are loving in our power.

BANKS: My vision is that we will center learning over evaluation. This learning will value narratives and not just quantitative data. Numbers only tell part of the story and transformative change requires embracing stories, complexity, and tension. We will honor that the narratives included in evaluations belong to the communities being served and that deficit based narratives are a form of violence against communities of color and those impacted by poverty that perpetuate inequities. We will center how evaluators and others in positions of power are in relationship with community partners and we are clear about why we are collecting data, what data will be used for, and who gets to define success. Ultimately, “evaluation” as we know it will be driven by those who are closest to the work and centered around learning, reflection, and asset based frames.

PINEDA: The future is bright. Just in the last few years we have seen a huge shift in the field as more change-makers are calling for and expecting their MLE partners to center equity in their work. I also see more colleagues working to rethink how they work. I want to take for granted that all researchers own their biases and have abandoned the myth of objectivity. In the near future, I want MLE practitioners to redefine what it means to conduct rigorous research and evaluation; to privilege  marginalized voices; and to value the knowledge of those who are most acutely affected by structural inequality over those who have more privilege and hold power.

Greg Behrman, NationSwell Founder and Chief Executive Officer, interviewed Joe about the inception of the organization, the challenges it faces, why this is personal for him, and the impact the organization is already celebrating. This is what he had to say.

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Greg Behrman, NationSwell: Thank you so much for talking to us today. Tell us the origin story of the Asian American Foundation.

Joe Bae, KKR, The Asian American Foundation: The origin story is a fascinating one. It starts with Jonathan Greenblatt, who runs the Anti-Defamation League, one of the country’s leading groups focused on anti-hate and discrimination. Jonathan and the ADL have a sophisticated infrastructure set up to track hate speech and violence towards not only Jewish people, but other marginalized and minority groups.

In March of 2020, when Covid first hit, Jonathan reached out to a few leaders in the Asian American community and said, “Listen. I’ve never seen anything like this in terms of our tracking of hate speech, harassment and bias directed at Asian Americans. It’s just spiking through the roof.”  A lot of that was likely because of Trump’s rhetoric around the “China flu,” and blaming China for the pandemic. It really sparked a lot of the negative anti-Asian sentiment across the United States.

But the most meaningful insight that the ADL shared with us was that when you see this kind of spike in hate speech against a community, it is almost always followed by a meaningful spike in physical violence against that community, like we saw after 9/11 against the Muslim American community.

So Jonathan called to tell us that this was likely to escalate and that this was going to happen at scale.  He was nervous for the Asian American community because we don’t have an equivalent infrastructure in the United States to, say, the NAACP for the Black community or the ADL for the Jewish community.   And as he predicted, we started seeing these one-off incidents of Asian American elderly people being attacked on the streets, an Asian American woman who had acid thrown in her face, or people getting spit on in the subway and buses. Stories like these — hundreds of articles and anecdotes shared on social media — were popping up all over the country.

That was really the kernel of this idea for creating TAAF: that we needed to build for the first time an infrastructure to go combat this immediate crisis. There were six initial Founders of TAAF, and we all got together for three days in July 2020 to start planning and debating what the core issues were that our community was facing.  What were our community’s inherent constraints and challenges?  How should we prioritize building a more robust infrastructure for the community?

The most immediate thing we all agreed upon was to basically incubate and fund an Asian American version of the ADL’s Hate Tracker so we could monitor incidents across social media. Our goal was to leverage the ADL’s experience for the next two to three years, to build the necessary expertise and knowledge, train local community organizations, and focus on Asian American hate crime tracking to proactively engage with local law enforcement and the FBI, engage with the media to get the most effective press coverage when bad things happen to members of our community and ultimately support victims of these crimes.

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Greg Behrman, NationSwell: How does your personal story connect to the foundation? Why are these issues so personal to you?

Joe Bae, KKR, The Asian American Foundation: My experience as an Asian American reflects much of the Asian American experience, whether you’re a Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Indian. We’re 6.5% of the population of the United States, but more than 60% of all Asian Americans and more than 70% of all adult Asian Americans were not born in the United States. So I think a big part of the constraints and challenges our communities face is that we are largely an immigrant community that came to the US in the last generation.  Not only is the AAPI community incredibly diverse and fragmented, but we simply have not had enough time to get organized and develop the social, political and philanthropic infrastructure to serve the needs of the community.

My kids are going to grow up differently. This past summer, I had all four of my kids at home during the COVID lockdown. We were eating three meals a day together. We were talking about what was happening to the Asian American community. All this discrimination. All the violence. And my kids, who were born here, had no idea what the broader Asian American experience had been for the last one hundred and fifty years. They had no idea what the Chinese went through with the Exclusion Act, or what the Japanese went through during World War II, or what the South Asian community went through right after 9/11. So I used lockdown as an opportunity to talk to my kids at the dinner table about our history every day.

A big part of the reason we feel like outsiders is because our kids who are Asian don’t understand our own history in this country. It’s never taught in the classroom or in public schools.  You never hear about Asian American studies. And there’s this “Model Minority” myth in this country which likes to characterize Asians as the successful minority, the poster child for what good immigration looks like. We supposedly don’t need any help as a community, we’re so successful, we’re lawyers and Ivy League grads.

But the reality is the vast majority of our community actually is not doing well. Asian Americans have the highest poverty rates among the elderly in New York City of any racial group.   Our community finds it incredibly difficult to access social services or government relief funds because of language and cultural barriers. So while the Asian American Anti-Hate Tracker is our immediate priority, there are broader needs within our massively fragmented community. There’s no national scale. Organizations in the Asian American community are very siloed. Today, there needs to be a different kind of organization that can help bring together big ideas, that can be a national, convening, organizational voice. That really was our starting point for how we thought about what our priorities need to be.

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Greg Behrman, NationSwell: Is your approach informed by experiences of discrimination or difficulty in your professional or personal life?

Joe Bae, KKR, The Asian American Foundation: My whole family was born in Korea. We moved here in the 1970s. My parents didn’t speak English, and I went to public school out on Long Island. And I was one of two Asians at the entire school. We did not have the kind of diversity that we strive for now. And, things like playground racial slurs, bullying, all that stuff was common. And immigrant families didn’t really recognize that as a problem — the big focus was on assimilation, on fitting in and now drawing attention to yourself.  Growing up in that timeframe, you really felt like an outsider in America.

My mom is a social worker. She has spent her whole life helping provide access to social services that many Asian Americans don’t know how to access.  She was a counselor for domestic violence victims in the Korean American community because so many of these women don’t know how to access social services, or speak to counselors or therapists. I think a lot of these shortcomings and challenges facing the Asian American community were very real to me growing up and was an important motivation for me to join TAAF.

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Greg Behrman, NationSwell: I know that the foundation is young, but what accomplishments and achievements are you celebrating?

Joseph Bae, KKR, Asian American Foundation: When we started, our Board members personally pledged $125 million over the next five years  to get TAAF up and running. Our plan was to do some incremental fundraising, so we went to friends and family and other like-minded non-profits or foundations to see if they would be willing to support TAAF as well. But what became very clear as we started these conversations with leading foundations, philanthropists, and corporations was that AAPI issues were really not on the radar screen for any of these organizations. In fact, AAPI non-profits and causes receive less than 1% of all the funding provided by foundations and corporations.

So we morphed our fundraising effort into something called the AAPI Giving Challenge where we talked to hundreds of companies and asked, “How are you thinking about supporting the Asian American community as part of your DE&I  and philanthropic budgets? Many of these companies have a massive number of  Asian Americans workers. What are you doing for them? What’s your strategic plan to support them?”

We told them, “We’re not asking you for money for TAAF — what we really want you to do is to be able to commit for the next five years a certain amount of money in support of whatever causes within the Asian American community that you decide. But we want a commitment of resources.”

Ultimately, we circled around $1.1 billion for the AAPI Giving Challenge among some of the biggest foundations, corporates, banks, and consulting firms. But if we could raise $1.1 billion in six weeks, there is no reason to believe that number can’t grow to over 10 billion dollars over time. So we’ll continue to reach out and hopefully unlock more resources for the Asian American community.

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Greg Behrman, NationSwell: What is most helpful to support your organization during this leg of your journey? What would bring the greatest value right now?

Joe Bae, KKR, The Asian American Foundation: We certainly can’t do this by ourselves. So whatever project or initiative we decide to prioritize, we’d like to be the convener and organizer that brings together key stakeholders and partners to the table.

One example of this is the massive vacuum in public education around Asian American history and studies, which is critical to understanding that Asian Americans are an important part of the fabric of this country.  This requires governors, state legislators, teachers and Asian American advocates to work together. Recent success in Illinois, New Jersey and California are promising green shoots. It’s not going to be easy to get to all fifty states on board, so our educational advocacy efforts are one place that we need partners.

And then there’s cultural narrative, where Asian Americans are stereotyped in a very specific way beyond the model minority myth. We are not the leads in tv shows — we’re usually the geeky tech person. We’re certainly not associated with being great athletes. So we’ve partnered with a lot of content creators on the West Coast and in New York to help change that narrative, to help get the world to see us a little differently.

Lastly, we’re really just scratching the surface on our Giving Challenge. We need corporate CEOs and foundation heads to really start engaging in a conversation about how they can better support their stakeholders who are members of the Asian American community.

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Greg Behrman is founder and CEO of NationSwell. Joe Bae is Co-CEO of KKR and co-founder of The Asian American Foundation. For more information on TAAF, visit their site. For more information on KKR, visit their site. For more information on NationSwell’s Institutional Membership, visit our Community page.

Amid the dual pandemics of racist violence and COVID-19, leaders in the NationSwell Council have recommitted themselves to the fight against white supremacy. We’ve asked our members what resources have helped them support their BIPOC team members and stakeholders. Below is a running list of what they’re sharing, updated as they continue to share them.

The Opportunity Network’s Anti-Racism Resources and Tools

“The Opportunity Network is committed to our Active Core Value to Center Social and Racial Equity Relentlessly through our pedagogical practices, engagement activities, and programming. We recognize our country’s long history of structural oppression and deeply rooted racism and brutality, and have compiled the below anti-racism resources for our students, families, and fellow educators. We’d be happy to have information about these shared in the article NationSwell is posting on the website in May to support or inspire others to use their platform to speak out against racially based violence. 

Zenit’s BIPOC Journal for Healing & Liberation

Member Alina Liao shares, “This journal has sections with guided prompts for processing racism and racial trauma, affirming our humanity and innate self-worth, deepening our connection with our ancestors, and taking steps toward healing and liberation.”

Journal for Aspiring White Anti-Racists 

This journal guides aspiring white allies in doing the important reflection needed to unlearn old beliefs and learn new beliefs that advance racial justice and equity. Alina says, “I figure this can be something BIPOC folx share with white friends/colleagues who keep asking them, ‘What can I do?’ which can be quite tiring.”

A podcast episode on Octavia Butler and her Legacy, by NPR’s Throughline

Author Ramtin Arablouei writes, “What Butler saw in our future matters more today than ever. She saw a world headed toward collapse. She saw a Black, female prophet who understood that nothing was inevitable, that we have the power to change things and change course. On some level, as a 13-year-old, I understood that Butler’s work was not just a warning but also an invitation. It invites us to let go of the conventions that can lock us into a destructive future and to embrace our greatest power, to change. She introduces us to a humanist vision for the future that makes space for metaphysical spirituality without the need for a traditional, omnipotent God-figure… Butler, who died in 2006 at age 58. is remembered as one of the greatest American science fiction writers. As we celebrate Black History Month, we should also remember her as a prophetic visionary like so many before her. She imagined worlds like the one we are living in, but encouraged each of us to dream our own dreams and to respond to the fear of uncertainty with creativity and bravery.”

Vox, The History of Tensions — and Solidarity — Between Black and Asian Communities, Explained

An article explaining the history of how “white supremacy tried to divide Black and Asian Americans — and how communities worked to find common ground.”

Policing in America, by NPR’s Throughline

From NPR: “Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. As the trial of Derek Chauvin plays out, it’s a truth and a trauma many people in the US and around the world are again witnessing first hand. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries. This week, the origins of policing in the United States and how those origins put violent control of Black Americans at the heart of the system.”

Screams & Silence by NPR’s Code Switch

From NPR: “Asian American organizers and influencers have been trying to sound the alarm over a dramatic spike in reports of anti-Asian racism over the last year, and have been frustrated by the lack of media and public attention paid to their worries. Then came last week, when a deadly shooting spree in Georgia realized many of their worst fears and thrust the issue into the national spotlight.”

Nikkolas Smith

An artist whose art and activism has been shared on social media by has been shared on social media by Michelle Obama, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Van Jones, Shaun King, Rihanna, Colin Kaepernick, Janet Jackson, Viola Davis, Jamie Foxx, Erykah Badu, Lupita Nyong’o, Kendrick Lamar, Tracee Ellis Ross, Ava Duvernay, Common, Simone Biles, Miley Cirus, Mark Ruffalo, Amy Schumer and many others.

Samasama

An Artist Collective endeavoring to shine a light on amazing creatives within the Asian American and Pacific Islander community and fellow artists of color.

If you’d like to share a resource, please get in touch.

One hour. Five incredible organizations. All that’s missing is you.

On June 26, 2020 at 1 P.M. EST, #NationSwellLive will convene leaders at the frontlines of COVID-19 response for communities with some of the most urgent need — and you can be a part of helping their efforts.

Ahead of our event, NationSwell spoke with Danielle Atkinson, founder and Executive Director of Mothering Justice. Mothering Justice is an organization whose mission is to “raise the voices of mothers and help them become policy makers and shapers” through “advocacy, leadership development, voter empowerment, and promoting family-friendly advocacy.” This is what they had to say about how they’re helping mothers and family caregivers through the COVID-19 crisis — and how you can support their efforts. 

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NationSwell: Tell us about yourself, Mothering Justice and the communities you serve.

Mothering Justice’s Danielle Atkinson: Years ago, I was looking for work in the progressive movement while I was pregnant. And when I got the job, I had to immediately think about maternity leave. My husband and I, by all means, we’re solidly middle class — but I was a contractor. My position didn’t allow me any protection around leave, or any job protections at all. And I definitely didn’t get paid leave. So I was able to keep my job, but I was only able to take four weeks off. And that was because it was unpaid — and I just knew that it would really be a burden on our finances if I was taking anymore. And four weeks is not enough to bond with the new baby, definitely not enough to heal.

When I came back to work, I was looking for an organization that was tackling this issue of leave and more generally mom issues.
And when I looked around, I really only found organizations that were led by white women, or use white women as the spokespeople. And I knew why, because again, I’ve been in the progressive movement for a really long time. And I knew that our stories and our face was seen as distracting, and could even be harmful to the cause because of the stigma that comes along with a mother of color needing help.

So I gathered the smartest moms of color I knew around owning this message, owning this strategy. And that’s when we came up with Mothering Justice. And the idea around Mothering Justice is, one: we want to be completely truthful about who we are and where we are in life and how the society was not established and set up and run for us; and two, we wanted to address the issues of financial stability that we were dealing with. And so we came up with a Mama’s Agenda, which are the issues that we hear again, and again from moms around what is impacting their own financial stability. And so we work on those issues and then we do leadership development to make sure that our mothers of color, we’re not just telling their sad story, but they were also armed with the policy insights that really just color their experience and the solution.

And then we do voter engagement, because we know that conventional wisdom is that married women vote a certain way and moms vote a certain way. And it really was not, it’s not a deep narrative around what a mother of, especially a mother of color, voter looks like. So in a nutshell, that’s what we do.

NationSwell: What are some points from your policy agenda?

Mothering Justice: The issues that makeup our platform are affordable childcare, leave policy — both paid sick days and family leave — wages and income support, and then maternal justice. And so we have been successful in raising the minimum wage here in Michigan and establishing a paid leave policy.

NationSwell: How has your work shifted or pivoted to meet the COVID-19 crisis?

Mothering Justice: So, we like to say the rest of the world is feeling right now what we always feel, having to balance — people are juggling a life that they really haven’t had to do before, right? Like, how is your house a classroom, a gymnasium, a workstation for you and maybe some other person? That at the least. And at the most, everyone’s understanding the importance of an essential worker. And we are talking about it in a way that we weren’t talking about it five months ago, right?

Essential workers were expendable workers. And we had this conversation about wages and benefits as: There are people that earned them because they have a level of education and an income level. And there are people that don’t because they just haven’t worked hard enough. Now, as our entire country is dependent on people on low wage work — as it always has, but now it’s visible. We are having a different conversation, and hopefully it will result in different outcomes. Hopefully, the conversation around paid leave or the importance of a stable childcare environment will be constant.

Because again, those have always been the backbones of our society. It’s just more visible now.

NationSwell: How can our audience support you in your efforts?

Mothering Justice: It’s really corny, but living your truth and being honest about what your circumstances are. Our society really runs on this narrative of bootstraps, which is not how any of us are really feeling, and surviving and thriving. We rely on a system; we live within a system. And if we are to be really honest and to look at the system, is it working for you? And maybe if it’s working for you, is it working for your cousin? Who is it working for, and who is not working for? And that might be someone you love and someone that you’re supporting. So we really need to be honest with ourselves and then reject the narrative that leads us to an internalized oppression, which leads us to a bootstraps mentality.

And if we really are real, we will say that we need to reconstruct our society around the values of caregiving, around caretaking and justice in a community. And it’s very easy to come to that conclusion when we first reject the narrative around only looking out for yourself. And everything else really flows that because you’re going to speak your truth. You’re going to raise the questions with potential elected officials. You’re going to demand that corporations pay a living wage. You’ll just live that.

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To learn more about #NationSwellLive, visit our event page here.