As philanthropy has boosted funding to address the nation’s legacy of anti-Black racism, advocates for Asian Americans hope the recent interest in social justice broadens to include their communities, which have also been the victims of hate.
Foundation giving to nonprofits that specifically support Asian Americans has been chronically low. It’s not clear whether that is changing. But two recent efforts give some observers hope that more money could be on the way.
This fall the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund received a total $2 million in grants from its existing grant makers and new donors. And the Boston Foundation last month said it had received $2 million to create an endowed Asian Community Fund.
The Boston Foundation is developing a plan for how to use the grants in Boston, which has a rapidly growing Asian American population, says Stephen Chan, the grant maker’s vice president for strategy.
It is difficult to make general statements about a group of people who come from countries from the Indian subcontinent to the Pacific Islands, says Chan. Some have been in the United States for generations, and some have recently arrived. Compared with other racial and ethnic groups, Asian Americans tend to have more widely varying levels of wealth and English proficiency.
Chan would like the fund to support efforts to build more complete public data sets that include information about the breadth of the Asian American experience. And he believes Asian American nonprofits in Boston can work in solidarity with other groups led by people of color. Like Black and Latino residents, Asian American Bostonians have been hit disproportionately hard by the Covid-related economic downturn, have experienced displacement by gentrification, and have been targets of racism.
“We’re looking for the intersection,” says Chan, who is the board chair of Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, a membership organization of foundation staff and trustees, “but we’re also looking for our own voice and to build our own power.”
More Data Needed
There is little fresh data about the scale of giving to benefit Asian Americans. Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy is embarking on an effort to track foundation data on the subject. The final tally is not complete, but total giving to benefit Asian Americans will likely come in at less than 1 percent of all foundation grants, the group said.
AAPIP surveyed its members this summer to see if foundations were considering grant making increases. Just over 10 percent of those who responded said their foundation considers supporting Asian Americans a priority. And 30 percent said grants to groups supporting Asian American nonprofits increased in the past five years. More than 60 percent said grants to groups supporting Black and Latino nonprofits had become more of a priority during the same time period.
Lyle Matthew Kan, interim vice president for programs at AAPIP, said the group is collecting additional data, which is needed to provide a better understanding of whether philanthropy is responsive to the needs of Asian Americans.
In the first five months of the pandemic, about 2,600 incidents of racism were reported to Stop AAPI Hate, a website that collects data on hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. For some people, Asian Americans became a scapegoat for the spread of the virus, which was first reported in China. The incidents included shunning or avoiding Asian Americans, verbal harassment, physical assault, and civil-rights violations.
As the incidents escalated, EunSook Lee, director of the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund, started hearing from many of the 40 or so community-organizing groups the fund supports. Many of them had questions about what legal recourse victims might have. Some were unsure about local policies on hate crimes.
It became clear to Lee that Asian-led groups needed a place to go for help.
“Asian Americans are facing a national phenomenon,” Lee says. “This is not just a local event.”
Lee’s annual grant-making budget is about $3 million. She thought she might get existing donors to add a few hundred thousand dollars to create a website, called the Movement Hub, where community groups can report hate crimes, research local laws across the country, and connect with groups in other states to generate momentum around changes in policy that could protect Asian Americans.
When she brought the idea to Luna Yasui, a program officer at the Ford Foundation, Yasui urged her to aim to raise $2 million.
“She said, ‘Let’s go big because the need is great,’” Lee says.
Grant makers contributed that had given in the past, including the Ford, Kellogg, and MacArthur foundations. And new donors, including the Groundswell Fund, Susan Sandler Fund, and Unbound Philanthropy came on board.
It’s also important to make sure that in solving that problem, that we engage other communities as well.
In addition to compiling data on hate crimes and providing legal resources, the Movement Hub seeks to connect community-organizing groups that are working on similar problems in different areas of the country. Those connections can include ties between Asian American organizing groups representing, for instance, Chinese and Cambodian Americans, as well as relationships with groups representing other people of color.
The goal of the Movement Hub is to push for the “shared liberation” of marginalized groups. For instance, it will provide people with information about how to support Black Lives Matter protests and has provided information about local efforts, such as a “phone jam” by Pacific Islander groups to flood Kentucky lawmakers with calls demanding action on the killing of Breonna Taylor.
Ted Wang, director of Unbound Philanthropy’s U.S. program, says making a grant to the Movement Hub was appealing because it isn’t “micro-focused” on racism against Asian Americans but instead sees it as part of a broader problem.
He says Asian American nonprofits benefit from a greater awareness from within philanthropy about racial justice, even if much of the current focus is on addressing anti-Black racism.
“It’s also important to make sure that in solving that problem, that we engage other communities as well,” Wang says.
For too long, according to the AAPIP study, foundations treated Asian Americans as “invisible.” Both the Boston Foundation and the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund hope to present a deeper understanding of Asian Americans’ needs.
In doing so, Bo Thao-Urabe, executive of the Coalition of Asian American Leaders, hopes to avoid a “race to the bottom” dynamic among Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Asian American nonprofits to attract the attention of major philanthropies. Instead, says Thao-Urabe, who is helping lead the Movement Hub, foundations need to get a nuanced understanding of the various experiences of Asian Americans, and to do so they need to trust the grassroots leaders who deal with racism every day.
“We should assume that racism is experienced by every community,” she says. “The question is, do we understand what that racism looks like?”
