API Equality – Northern California Interns Reflect on NQAPIA Leadership Summit 2013

At this year’s National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance’s (NQAPIA) Leadership Summit in Honolulu, HI, we learned organizing skills and gained more perspective on Pacific Islander needs and issues. API Equality – Northern California was also able to share our own best practices and knowledge by leading sessions on storytelling, one-on-one relationship building, and radical welcome.Check out what our interns thought about the summit here!

SAVE THE DATE: Summer 2013 Intern Celebration! September 6th @ 8PM
We’re sending off another intern class with an end-of-the-summer fundraiser! There’s so much to celebrate – our work would not have been possible without the immense dedicate of our 4 interns. Join us at our Intern Celebration to see hear about what we’ve been up to this summer. RSVP on Facebook!

PROJECT UPDATES 

 

PINK ELEPHANT PROJECT
We’re bringing together a cohort of API LGBTQ people of faith and allies to build community, record our stories, and develop skills to promote greater understanding of LGBTQ people in API faith communitites. We have a few more slots available so sign up now!

For more information click here.
To sign up for our cohort click here.

 

DRAGONFRUIT
At our 2nd Dragonfruit meeting this past month, we gained new project participants! We created small teams so folks can work together to transcribe and conduct their interviews. Our participants are documenting such compelling stories – you can still sign up to help us document LGBTQ API histories.

OUR FAMILIES MATTER – by ASPIRE Leader May Liang
July has been a very active and engaging month for ASPIRE and API Equality Northern California about immigration reform. Since the beginning of the collaboration between the two organizations, we have collected more than 450 postcards in support of improving immigration reform. We are also on our way to collecting some truly great stories of strong, API LGBTQ immigrants, documented and undocumented. The outreaching we have been doing in the past month was primarily about the border militarization included in the Senate Bill (S. 744). We have gone out to the Civic Center in San Francisco and the UC Berkeley campus to do outreaching to the general public. We were lucky to get some great volunteers to join us in the efforts and had a fun time teaching and learning what good street outreaching means. For the next month, we hope to continue doing public outreaches with a new theme centering on the changes in the visa system and we hope you can join us!

FALL 2013 INTERNSHIP
We’re looking for interns to support our projects during the Fall for 10-12hrs/wk. Email tracy@apiequalitync.org for more information.

VOLUNTEER OF THE MONTH AUGUST 2013 | ESTHER KANG 


Originally from Chicago, Esther moved to the Bay Area in 2010, and found community in the queer API spaces that API Equality – Northern California provides. We thank Esther for all her work with Breakthrough Conversations, PRIDE, community meetings, fundraisers, and Dragonfruit. Read more!