New Asian American Foundation Aims to Shift Narratives, Curb Hate Crimes, and Promote Change

At its formal launch event this month, the Asian American Foundation announced it had already attracted $250 million in contributions, a significant sum for a just-started effort. That philanthropic firepower was matched with the influential speakers who kicked off the event: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

On Thursday, after a meeting with White House officials in which President Biden signed into a law a bill that aims to curb hate directed at Asian Americans, the Asian American Foundation announced that more donations and commitments have poured in, raising the total to nearly $1.1 billion.

Sonal Shah, president of the new organization, says the list of boldface names at the launch event demonstrates interest in filling a long-unmet need for more focus — and more resources — directed at Asian Americans. “There’s been a demand for an organization like TAAF to exist,” she says.

In addition to the presidents, speakers included Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois; Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York; Darren Walker. president of the Ford Foundation; and Lisa Ling, CNN host.

Philanthropic support from prominent institutions has been pouring in. Among private foundations, Ford, MacArthur, Mellon, and Surdna have provided aid, as have the California Endowment and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

TAAF

Corporate sponsors include Amazon, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Citi Foundation, Etsy, Goldman Sachs, Levi Strauss, Merck, and Zoom.

Wealthy donors are also pitching in, including board members Li Lu, founder and chairman of Himalaya Capital; Joseph Bae, co-president of the KKR global investment firm; Joe Tsai, co-founder and executive vice chairman of the Alibaba Group; Jerry Yang, founder of AME Cloud Ventures and co-founder of Yahoo; and Peng Zhao, CEO of Citadel Securities.

Shah, an Indian American, brings a hefty background in both policy and philanthropy to her new job. She was Obama’s first director of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation and served as head of global development at Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm. She also teaches at Georgetown University, where she was the founding executive director of the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation.

She discussed the needs of Asian Americans and the ambitious agenda of the Asian American Foundation in a conversation with the Chronicle. One key point she emphasized repeatedly was the need for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to feel and be treated like they belong in America.

The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

You are off to a quick start with a big commitment of funds. What are your first moves going to be? I’m sure they’re underway already.

We are off to the races. Even before we formally announced the creation of TAAF, we had already started the process of making important grants. We had made a grant to the Urban Institute to do a landscape analysis of AAPI organizations. We have given a grant to Asian Americans Advancing Justice on the work that they have been doing — Stop AAPI Hate. We’ve given a grant to National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. We’ve also given a grant to the Anti-Defamation League, and we’ve given a grant to the Asian American Education Project.

What was important for us is that we start the work even before we publicly launched the organization because we knew it was important to be a part of the Asian American community and to support the community.

We are working in three main areas — anti-hate education, narrative change, and data and research.

Can you provide more specifics about those three areas?

For education, it’s curriculum development and training teachers. Another part is working on legislative changes to make sure that information about the role of Asian Americans in our country can be taught in schools. We’re also looking at how we can work with book publishers.

The second piece is on narrative change — working with the media, telling Asian American stories, and making sure people know that Asian American stories are part of the American story. We’ll be working with media and documentary filmmakers.

Also, we want better tracking of hate incidents. We know Pew and others are doing research about Asian American communities. We’re looking to see where the gaps in research are. And we’re looking at preventing hate.

Where are you right now in terms of your fundraising, collected and committed?

There’s $125 million committed by our board, and there is another $125 million that we’ve already raised. That is not all coming to TAAF. We’re actually asking people to give money to AAPI organizations and initiatives directly. We don’t need to own all the money. What we’re asking people to do is to give and be a part of the community and increase their giving as a community.

What do you see as the biggest challenges facing your organization in this moment and the other organizations that you partner with?

The demand and the need are really important. Hate against Asian American communities is not going down, it’s going up. We’re continuing to see spikes, and it’s important that our communities are able to respond.

One of the challenges of combating hate is, how do we respond to the scale of the problem, and how do we help our organizations meet the demands and the needs that are out there today — and the needs that are still to come? We have been severely underresourced as a community. We’re 23 million people, and we get less than 0.5 percent of philanthropic resources. We’re working to ensure that donors, funders, corporations, and others understand the needs of AAPI communities.

And we are looking to solve the education narrative to make sure that Asian Americans are seen as a part of America. We are not perpetual foreigners; we are actual Americans contributing to the United States.

Also, we need to take on the “model minority” myth, this assumption that all Asian Americans are highly educated and wealthy. We also have the highest disparities in income. We are a diverse set of communities.

Are there specific partnerships you’re developing that you’d like to talk about?

We’re talking to foundations like the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Surdna Foundation about how we might work together — ways that we can co-fund and learn from each other. We’re having lots of those conversations right now. These are early-stage conversations.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

Our mission is creating a sense of belonging and prosperity. The belonging piece is really important. We’re always seen as perpetual foreigners in many communities. We want to create an Asian American community that feels stronger in who we all are and also feel united in the fact that we can make change together. That’s a big reason why TAAF exists.