Leader Helps Mobilize Asian Americans for Big Impact in Elections

Asian Americans have mostly been an “invisible” part of the electorate in America, says EunSook Lee.

That ends now, she says.

Lee, the executive director of the Asian American Pacific Islander Civic Engagement Fund, steers more than $3 million in grant money each year to organizations led by Americans of Asian descent that get people fired up to cast a vote and ensure that public officials respond to their needs. With the country divided over immigration, housing policy, and criminal-justice policies — issues that hit close to home for the progressive groups she supports — she has ramped up her efforts for the 2020 primaries and the general election.

Late last year she pressed a cadre of community-organizing trainers she leads to log extra hours. Grants that were scheduled to go out in January were processed months before that, and checks scheduled for distribution to grantees this summer will go out several months early — well before the party conventions in July and August. She hopes the effort gets the attention of more foundations.

Support specifically for Asian American civic-engagement projects has barely registered for most grant makers. “Given that so much rides on the election, we’re doing our best to send the money out sooner rather than later,” Lee says. “But we can’t just turn up the volume two months before the election and tell people to vote. There’s a lot of base-building and preparation that has to be done before that.”

Low Turnout

Over the past two decades, Asian Americans haven’t lived up to their potential at the ballot box. Less than 27 percent who were eligible to vote participated in the 2014 election. They voted at about the same rate as Hispanics, but their participation rate was far less than African Americans, who had nearly 41 percent participation, and white voters at nearly 46 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.

Experts provide several explanations for why Asian Americans stay away from the polls: For some, it could be a language barrier. Others come from families with direct experience living under communism or dictatorships, where civic participation never became a habit. And others may just feel left out; that no matter how they try to make their concerns known, no one is listening.

More recent voter trends suggest that may be changing.

In 2018, Asian Americans were a big part of a midterm surge that put Democrats in control of the U.S. House. Over all, turnout increased 33 percent in 2018 compared with the 2014 midterms.

The increase among women of color exceeded that mark. Participation among Asian American women increased 48 percent, Latinas by 51 percent, and African American women by 28 percent, according to an analysis by the Asian American Pacific Islander Civic Engagement Fund.

Asian Americans were also contacted at a relatively high rate by groups conducting voter-registration drives, suggesting that there is fertile ground for voter mobilization efforts among many Asian American groups, according to the report.

The findings, Lee says, should serve as a rallying cry for philanthropy to start supporting grassroots groups led by women of color, and specifically Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. “This is a community that has potential,” she says.

Expanded Identity

Lee, who emigrated from Korea to Canada as a young girl and then to the United States, thinks civic participation is human nature. When people see they can make a difference, they become more involved. It’s a lesson she learned as a high-school student when she organized a multiethnic coalition that successfully pushed the Toronto School Board to divest from the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

Working with members of other marginalized groups sold Lee on people power. It also helped her broaden her self-identity beyond a person of Korean descent or as an Asian American Pacific Islander activist; she began to see herself as a person of color participating in a larger struggle against racism in the United States alongside members of other races and ethnic groups.

Earlier in her career, when she served as a leader of various Korean American nonprofit organizations, Lee says she regularly encountered people who were willing to pay and wait in a long line to cast ballots in those groups’ leadership races. Just because they have had low voter-participation rates in congressional and presidential races doesn’t mean they don’t have a robust civic life, expressed by church attendance and participation in immigrant organizations and alumni associations.

“At that moment in time for Korean Americans, those organizations were more important than the city council that represented them. “They have felt traditionally isolated and excluded, and that has translated into a lack of voter participation.”

Recognizing Needs

Asian Americans Advancing Justice

The $3 million in annual grants the Asian American Pacific Islander Civic Engagement Fund makes is a small slice of the total in foundation money devoted to educating and mobilizing voters. It is the only stream of cash, Lee says, that is expressly focused on Asian Americans.

Foundations made $392 million in grants to promote civic participation in 2017, the most recent year for which totals are available, according to Candid. That’s down slightly from the $406 million they spent in 2016, an election year, but nearly a $100 million increase over the amount spent in 2013.

Hahrie Han, director of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, thinks that number will increase as more foundations look to boost voter participation among groups with historically low participation rates.

In recent years, Han says, foundations have begun to recognize that civic engagement shouldn’t be bound to the electoral cycle. To help groups that have faced barriers to the political process, grant makers have expanded their support in off-years and have focused on providing leadership training and supporting communications efforts. Those efforts, Han says, can help build the kind of expertise and cohesion among groups of people that allow them to hold political office holders accountable and ensure legislation incorporates their priorities.

“Even if you get people elected to office, you have to have an infrastructure that holds them accountable,” she says. “There’s a gap between simply getting those communities into motion and actually building power.”

‘Model Minority’ Myth

The Asian American Pacific Islander Civic Engagement Fund was started in 2014 as a $2 million collaboration among the Wallace H. Coulter and Ford foundations, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Unbound Philanthropy. Since then, seven other foundations have contributed support.

As they knocked on doors to secure commitments from other foundations, Lee and Sue Van, president of the Coulter Foundation, were often met with resistance. Some, Van recalls, didn’t see a need because they subscribed to what’s called the “model-minority” myth, that by and large Asian Americans are well-educated and financially secure.

Others, she says, had trouble seeing Asian American Pacific Islanders as a single identity because of the large number of ethnicities, nations of origin, and languages spoken within the group.

“They said, ‘If we fund the Chinese, the Japanese will get ticked off, and if we fund the Koreans, the Chinese will get ticked off,’” Van says.

In the early years of the fund, Lee plotted the grants made on a grid to make sure the money was spread as evenly as possible among the various groups. Now, she says, the fund tries to direct more money where there is a greater need. For that reason, in recent years nonprofits that represent Southeast Asian Americans, which have had higher poverty rates and lower rates of educational attainment, have received a disproportionate share of grants.

Grantees typically get $70,000 in unrestricted money. One group the fund currently supports is Filipino Advocates for Justice, which last year successfully pushed for a cap on rent increases in Alameda County, Calif. Another grantee, the Southeast Asian Coalition in North Carolina, took part in a campaign that raised awareness of the federal 287(g) program, which deputizes local law-enforcement officers to detain undocumented immigrants. After their campaign, a sheriff who had touted his assistance of federal immigration authorities lost a re-election bid.

Getting Involved

Photo by Steven Tavares

In addition to direct support, the fund works to increase the political might of its grantees through its community-organizing training program and through research papers that help define the Asian American electorate and suggest ways build a communications strategy that is seen as vital and effective.

“The groups we support are super savvy,” says Jennifer Humke, senior program officer at MacArthur, who manages the Chicago foundation’s grant to the civic-engagement fund. “But they don’t have the capacity to do strategic communications or storytelling in a way that helps build coherent relationships within the community or challenges negative, inaccurate narratives.”

Many Asian Americans looking to get involved in politics feel online organizing models, like email messages or online petitions, don’t “feel alive” or speak to people in the language or style that resonates with them, says Cayden Mak, executive director of 18 Million Rising, a digital organizing network that received support from the fund for four years ending in 2017.

Mak sees a growing identification among younger people as Asian American Pacific Islanders, as opposed to, or in addition to, identifying as a smaller subgroup, such as Indian American or Chinese American. That change, he says, has opened up new possibilities for mobilizing people to vote.

“One of the coolest things about Asian American organizing now is there’s so much room to play with what it can mean to be Asian American,” he says. There’s a renewed sense of curiosity about what it means for us to be in community as Asian Americans and what kind of power we can exercise in the world.”