About

The Asian American Community Training (A.C.T.) is a program to cultivate Asian and Pacific Islander young adults’ commitment to movement building and progressive social change.

A.C.T. started when a small group of multigenerational API activists from Boston, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area met together in November 2004 in an effort to rebuild the API Movement. They started to build a structure and generate the momentum for an API Movement that focuses on the three regional areas the activists came from as well as Philadelphia.

Recognizing that young adults have played an important role in grassroots social change, A.C.T. is a project of the Bay Area API Movement Building that seeks to cultivate future community organizers and potential leaders for the API Movement.

Mission

Our mission is to train emerging Asian American activists to gain the organizing skills and political analysis to transform their communities. Recognizing the need to rebuild an API Movement, ACT provides a training program focusing on grassroots organizing within Bay Area Asian American communities. We believe that through an API Movement, youth and communities will empower one another to achieve sustainable equality and social justice.

 

History

In its 2005 pilot year, A.C.T. participants consisted of UC Berkeley and Stanford University students who spent two days building relationships with one another and with community organizations, such as the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) and the Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA). Then in 2006 and 2007, A.C.T. expanded to include students from nine universities and community colleges in the Bay Area.  Throughout three days, participants engaged in political education and organizing skills workshops, which culminated in a community action.

After an intensive assessment of what is needed to strengthen the Bay Area API Movement, community activists redesigned the curriculum to sharpen our focus on movement building. The newly designed ACT seeks to bring together experienced young adult activists and student leaders to study, share, and strategize how we build an Asian Pacific Islander movement. It is our hope to build a multigenerational community to build a movement for equity, social justice and social change.