The Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW) is a political home for pan-Asian communities in Greater Boston. They are a member-led organization committed to building grassroots power through political education, creative expression, and issue-based and neighborhood organizing.
At AARW, they envision a world free from violence and oppression, where people can live with dignity and have their basic needs met with ample opportunities to thrive. they seek a future that honors all Asian Pacific Islander communities, including diasporic and Indigenous People of East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia, Pacific and Caribbean Islands, Native Hawaii, and Oceania.
A documentary that AARW worked on in collaboration with the Asian Outreach Center at Greater Boston Legal Services and Brian Redondo, a local filmmaker in NYC on the issue of Southeast Asian deportation, that highlighted the narratives and experiences of three Southeast Asian families AARW was organizing with against detention and deportation.
2024 in Review
As one of their priority campaigns for 2024, “Lan’s Fight to Stay”, #Louder4Lan, AARW created this podcast episode series to highlight Lan’s story and the connection to the broader Southeast Asian deportation crisis and organizing efforts.
Check out the listening guide, that was created to accompany the podcast episode series.
Another project that AARW worked on in 2024 is the Building Community Capacity for Social Change report. This was a report they worked with their partners after facilitating a mental health & emotional wellness space for their Southeast Asian impacted base and their loved ones, as well as undocumented Asian elders.
A note from AARW
Since 2017, AARW has risen up in Massachusetts to be on the frontlines of community defense against the escalated detentions and deportations targeting Southeast Asian refugees and immigrants. Following 2017 to the current moment, we have been able to build and strengthen our organizing and basebuilding efforts in order to address the Southeast Asian deportation crisis through rapid response organizing, and systems and policy change work.
Looking Forward
2025 will be a monumental period for AARW, and our collective work in the Southeast Asian anti-deportation movement. After welcoming a shift in our organizational leadership, we will be celebrating 45 years as a pan-Asian movement building organization, and are continuing to build up our pan-Asian working-class base that includes our systems-impacted Southeast Asian community members, our youth and young adults, Vietnamese tenants and renters, and our queer and trans membership. Next year, representing the 50th year anniversary of the end of the War in Southeast Asia, we will be organizing and mobilizing our communities to demand an end to the Southeast Asian deportation crisis, and to hold the U.S. accountable for creating the conditions that displaced Southeast Asian folks as a result of war and genocide, and the prison-to-deportation pipeline.
With support from New Breath Foundation’s support through the We Got Us Fund, we will be able to increase and strengthen our capacity and basebuilding efforts in order to defend and protect all of our communities in the face of ongoing systemic and structural violence, and build towards a world where all of our people and communities can live full and thriving lives.