As we close on 2021, Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC reflects on the ways we worked with our communities to rise to the challenges we faced this year.

It is impossible to reflect on our work without acknowledging the devastating impact of COVID-19 on our community — and other communities of color. And at this point of reflection, we look back on the tragedies and the remarkable resilience of our communities in the face of anti-Asian hate. On March 16, six women of Asian descent were murdered in an act of  abhorrent hate. Just weeks later, four members of our Sikh community were murdered in the Indianapolis shooting. In our lowest points and times of despair, there was an outpouring of support that we have never seen before, spurring our community and the nation into action.

Thanks to you, Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC protected, empowered, and advanced our communities nationwide this year. Please consider making a contribution as we head into 2022 and continue to fight for the civil and human rights of Asian Americans and beyond.

Advancing Justice | AAJC first joined forces with Hollaback! in April 2020 to address anti-Asian American harassment in the wake of COVID-19, and have now trained over 120,000 people to safely intervene and stand up to hate through public and private sessions. The tremendous interest pushed us to launch in-language trainings with simultaneous interpretation in Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Tagalog, and Thai.

This year, we re-doubled our efforts to support Asian American communities nationwide through partnerships, trainings, and subgrants to build the capacity of community-based organizations serving Asian American communities. Advancing Justice | AAJC has already committed to investing over $4.5 million – including an initiative funded through an Advancing Justice | AAJC and Kaiser Permanente’s partnership – to allow over 40 Asian American Pacific Islander organizations to tackle issues such as anti-Asian hate, redistricting, digital empowerment, and misinformation/disinformation.

Advancing Justice | AAJC has served as a national voice for Asian Americans during the pandemic and in response to increased attacks on our community. We have voiced the needs of our community in mainstream and social media, before corporate leaders and the highest levels of the government, and with national and local community leaders. Read more on our numbers here.

Since the launch of the Anti-Racial Profiling Project in October 2020, Advancing Justice | AAJC has led advocacy efforts in response to the government’s racial targeting and profiling of Asian Americans and Asian immigrant scientists, researchers, and scholars. We spearheaded advocacy calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to end the “China Initiative” as well as other practices and programs in other agencies engaging in race-based targeting of Asian Americans for surveillance and investigations.

Together with the Value Our Families campaign, Advancing Justice | AAJC advocated for and won the inclusion of Representative Judy Chu’s Reuniting Families Act in President Biden’s Day One immigration bill, which would modernize and fix the family immigration system. Through advocacy throughout the year with Congress and the administration, provisions to clear family immigration backlogs were passed by the House, and are under consideration in the Senate.

This year, we successfully advocated for the immediate repeal of the 2020 Presidential Memorandum, which sought to exclude undocumented individuals in the apportionment count, and Executive Order 13880 (issued in July 2019), which sought the creation of a block-level citizen-voting age population dataset. Advancing Justice | AAJC was also a key partner in the effort to secure a bipartisan Congressional response with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 4).

Advancing Justice | AAJC is the first Asian American civil rights organization to have a program dedicated specifically to advocating for greater equity in telecommunications and technology for Asian Americans. The Telecommunications, Technology and Media team worked with the FCC by providing in-language resources on the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program on the FCC website to help get low-income Asian American families online, and they have also hosted free webinars to promote media literacy and protect Asian American and Asian immigrant communities from mis/disinformation.

Throughout 2021, Advancing Justice | AAJC played key roles advocating for equity and justice in several landmark court cases, most notably in the areas of education, voting rights, and reproductive rights. In the lawsuit Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Chicago et al. v. White et al. (N.D. Ill.), we represented the Advancing Justice — Chicago affiliate as well as other plaintiffs and successfully settled, ensuring efficient in-language voter registration services through driver services in Illinois.

While we celebrated this year’s American Courage Awards online, our event was nothing short of impactful and moving for the hundreds who tuned in. With the help of some special friends, we honored CBS News Senior White House Correspondent Weijia Jiang with the American Courage Award, our partner Hollaback! with the Changemaker Award, and Bank of America with the Bridge Builder Award.