Program areas at Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote
National field program: the national field program recruits and manages the national network of community based partners and executes apiavote's national voter engagement strategy in order to meet its two-fold goal: 1) establish a culture of habitual, consistent voting with the millions of first-time, newly-registered, and all aapi eligible voters. This is accomplished through the distribution of subgrants to partners, multi touch voter engagement and education program, and leadership training, 2) invest resources, coaching, and technical training to aapi-led grassroot organization partners to integrate civic engagement principals into their core programmatic work.
Strategic communications: apiavote works to communicate with our communities in the languages that enable them to best understand our messaging, and ensure that they see themselves as part of our democracy. The strategic communications team focuses on positioning apiavote as a national authority on the aapi electorate, both within our communities and the general us public and uses this platform to uplift the diversity of all our voices and concerns. We accomplish this through multi-language and culturally tailored content, mis and disinformation monitoring and counter narrative, engagement with ethnic media, and creating a platform for narrative change about aapis.
Outreach: apiavote empowers and supports its nationwide network of partner organizations through hosting or attending conferences, events, and meetings to further our mission of empowering Asian American and Pacific Islander (aapi) communities to strengthen and sustain a culture of civic engagement. This also includes meetings with potential partners to educate them on being a part of apiavote's vast network, as well as attending community events to further our relationship building in the aapi nonprofit space. We also worked in coalition with more than 50+ nonprofits, multicultural partners, influencers, celebrities and community leaders to host the unity march, a national effort to build a solidarity movement following the rise in violence against Asian americans.
Youth engagement: apiavote organizes aapi student organizations and leaders from around the country to increase voter turnout among aapi youth through voter activation efforts, power building, and leadership development and training. We accomplish this through our college youth ambassador program that recruits aapi identifying participants from campuses across the country to conduct culturally-relevant voter outreach campaigns, educate their broader campus community on the issues important to the aapi electorate, and build sustainable programming that include and recognize aapis.
Policy, advocacy and research: to better represent our communities at the national level, apiavote has expanded it capacity to empower it network partners with better insight into the policies and politics of voting rights, and coordinate our inside, outside advocacy strategy through multiple strategies that include: conducting the Asian American voter survey which is the earliest pre-election voter survey conducted in Asian languages, producing aapi state fact sheets every two years that share a detailed breakdown of important aapi demographics in every state, section 203 and voting rights legislation monitoring and advocacy, and providing training, consultation and data support to access, analyze, and manipulating ("cutting turf") voter and census data is a specialized and costly necessity for our ace network to effectively identify and activate our growing communities.
Leadership development and capacity building: apiavote holds a series of weekend-long leadership trainings for nonprofit staff, community leaders and volunteers in cities across the county. Trainees are taught to run an effective voter-mobilization program and incorporate civic participation into an apia Vote and/or coalition's existing structure.