In celebration of Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, The New York Women’s Foundation is excited to spotlight three of our many remarkable community partners dedicated to supporting the AAPI community every day. Together, we honor the rich heritage and continuing contributions of the AAPI community through initiatives and advocacy aimed at fostering understanding and action.
We are proud to highlight our ongoing collaboration with The W.O.W. Project Inc., a dynamic initiative based inside Wing On Wo & Co. in Chinatown, Manhattan. We first funded the organization back in 2019. Led by women, non-binary, queer, and trans individuals, The W.O.W Project is dedicated to preserving and nurturing Chinatown’s cultural heritage through arts, activism, and intergenerational dialogue. Their mission to create spaces for meaningful conversations and cultural preservation resonates deeply with our goal of fostering community solidarity and resilience.
Serena Yang, a member of W.O.W., recently spoke of the impact the organization has had in her life during the 2024 Celebrating Women Breakfast hosted by The New York Women’s Foundation:
“I came to W.O.W., at the time still a young organization responding to gentrification in Chinatown, with this sense of urgency. I was a teenager anxious to make sense of the world and my place in it…For the first time, I found myself surrounded by other queer young women and trans and nonbinary youth of Chinese heritage. I saw there were ways of being myself that I had never imagined before. We came from all over the diaspora, and community was never a given. We learned to make community.”
Serena Yang
In 2022, The Foundation began funding Red Canary Song, a grassroots organization that champions the rights and safety of Asian and migrant sex workers and massage workers. Red Canary Song’s commitment to mutual aid, labor rights, and the decriminalization of sex work highlights the urgent need for justice and support for some of the most vulnerable members of our community. Their transnational organizing and focus on migrant justice align with our broader mission of advocating for equity and human rights.
Yin Q., one of the core organizers of Red Canary Song, was recently featured in an interview with The 19th News:
“Our solution to creating safer environments within workspaces is for us to first decriminalize sex work, decriminalize unlicensed massage work, and also to really give communities the resources for community care so that people can get the resources that they need, whether it be access to mental health, physical health, emergency rooms, education, or translation services.”
Yin Q.
Since 2001, we have also fostered a longstanding partnership with Sakhi for South Asian Survivors, an organization that provides vital, culturally competent services to survivors of gender-based violence within the South Asian and Indo-Caribbean diaspora. Sakhi’s comprehensive support programs, including counseling, housing assistance, and economic empowerment, underscore the importance of survivor-led initiatives in the fight for gender justice. Their work is instrumental in fostering a safe and empowering environment for all survivors.
Earlier this year, Kavita Mehta, the Executive Director of Sahki for South Asian Survivors, spoke on an episode of the Tuckered Out podcast:
“We imagine transformative change happening in the South Asian community by three mechanisms working together: our direct work with survivors, community engagement, and advocacy, which is really centered around systems change and policy work…We transitioned from an organization that went from primarily doing crisis management and economic support for survivors to thinking more holistically about all of the multiple barriers that are within a survivor’s life and how do we bring those services in house.“
Kavita Mehta
Led by and for the AAPI community, these three organizations, along with others collaborating with The Foundation, are actively creating more inclusive and equitable spaces every day. Join us in standing beside them and supporting this vision of a world where all women, girls, and gender-expansive people can thrive.
Advance Justice For Women
