Orange County Asian And Pacific Islander Community Alliance Inc

Create multi-generational strength and collective care by empowering working class Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AA and NHPI) communities in Orange County (OC).

Abundant Community Transformations is a fiscally-sponsored project under the Orange County Asian Pacific Islander Community Alliance (OCAPICA). ACT is convening and building capacity of the most impacted AA and NHPI community organizations in OC to work in four-pronged manner: 1) empower our communities, 2) engage in policy advocacy, 3) influence decisions that directly impact us, and 4) build the investment and sustainability for AANHPI movement infrastructure.

We are in a transition period where we are shifting away from how traditional non-profit organizations in OC have taken an individualistic approach to serving the community. The Abundant Community Transformations Coalition initiative (built on lessons of previous efforts) is attempting to align key AA and NHPI groups, especially giving leadership to those that are most marginalized within the AA and NHPI space. We have been able to develop a deep sense of power sharing and respect for each other as we build this coalition.

Together, the core members of this coalition have 50+ years of direct community building experience, including multiple generations of experience intoward serving and empowering our people in the AA and NHPI community. The leadership in this coalition are trailblazers in their respective communities and who are able to lead and guide with a clear shared purpose and values.

Key skills that are embodied in this coalition are:
Policy advocacy
Health advocacy & public health management
Youth and adult organizing
Health service delivery such as cancer screening, mental health services, and offering Covid support and PPE for AANHPI communities
Advocacy and leadership building in the LGBTQ+ community in OC
Developing community health workers that are based in our neighborhoods and communities
Strategic visioning for the OC landscape

ACT is grounded in values of collective responsibility (kuleana and jeong), care, equity, community safety, justice, and abundance.

Top Accomplishments:
1. Continuing to sustain a healthy, power-sharing coalition of AANHPI organizations for 3+ years since 2021.
2. Developed coalitional capacity by hiring two full-time staff - Coalition Manager and Coalition Coordinator.
3. Engaged in deep political education work around participatory budgeting to set the stage for future campaigns on creating a transparent county budgeting process in OC.

Current goals:
1. Stronger infrastructure and ecosystem building for the most marginalized AA and NHPI organizations in OC where there have been decades of disinvestment. This year, we will be recruiting and onboarding new organizational members into our coalition.
2. Strengthening a AA and NHPI Non-Profit leadership pipeline especially focusing on women-identified, queer/gender non-conforming and more marginalized leaders in OC such as Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander leadership.
3. Transparent County Budgeting Processes where AA and NHPI communities can play a leadership role in alliance with other BIPOC communities. This year, we are focused on tracking the OC budget process and deepening our budget analysis. In doing so, we will also evaluate where we can organize with others in OC to impact budget decisions at the county level.

The ACT coalition, despite its significant accomplishments, faces pressing needs to further its mission of empowering AA and NHPI communities in Orange County. Programmatically, ACT requires resources to expand its political education and policy advocacy initiatives, particularly around participatory budgeting and county-level budget analysis. Managerially, the coalition needs support to recruit and onboard new organizational coalition members, strengthening both members’ and the coalitions’ infrastructure and ecosystem. ACT also aims to develop a leadership pipeline focusing on marginalized AA and NHPI leaders, including women, queer/gender non-conforming individuals, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander community members. To do that, ACT seeks additional funding to re-grant to coalition members. Financially, ACT requires sustained funding to maintain its full-time staff and expand its capacity to combat structural racism, language injustice, and barriers to civic engagement. Additional resources would enable ACT to amplify its impact, foster transparency in local governance, and build a more robust, inclusive AA and NHPI movement in Orange County.

Orange County

The Abundant Community Transformations (ACT) Coalition is a fiscally-sponsored project under the Orange County Asian Pacific Islander Community Alliance (OCAPICA). As such, the ACT Coalition itself does not have a CEO/Executive Director. Rather, ACT operates as a coalition of core organizations with consensus-making power.

Sora Park Tanjasiri, University of California, Irvine
It is my privilege and pleasure to serve as chair of the OCAPICA board of directors. I am a public health professional and professor at the University of California, Irvine, and have supported OCAPICA since we were founded by Mary Anne Foo in 1997. I first got involved in OCAPICA after seeing the devastating effects of institutional racism and policy exclusion on Asian Americans and other communities during and after the Los Angeles riots of 1992, where I worked at a non-profit primary care clinic in Koreatown. Since that time I have been nothing short of amazed at OCAPICA impacts in the areas of health and mental health promotion, workforce development, youth leadership development and policy advocacy. When we started in a one room office in Garden Grove, Orange County had only a handful of social service agencies supporting the needs of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. It was Mary Anne Foo’s vision that Orange County needed more community organizations to serve our diverse populations, and since 1997 I’m so proud that OCAPICA has been crucial to not only filling the gap but also supporting the founding and/or growth of ethnic and cultural specific organizations to serve the needs of their own communities. I hope you will join me in supporting OCAPICA in any way you can – by joining us at our annual Tastemakers of Orange County fundraiser, by promoting us to your organizations, and by referring anyone in need to our services. Thank you for being part of our family and for promoting the health of our diversity communities throughout Orange County!