AYPAL

AYPAL: Building API Community Power is a youth power organization that utilizes ethnic studies, cultural connection and history, and arts activism to empower youth from immigrant and refugee families to be leaders for school and neighborhood change. Since 1998, AYPAL: Building API Community power has been a leading organization in building the power of API youth and families to spur change in schools and the Oakland community. Utilizing arts activism and ethnic studies centered curriculum, AYPAL has grown thousands of leaders by helping them develop a sense of collective and individual identity, connecting them to their cultural history, understanding issues and policies that impact them locally and beyond, and activating them to engage with their community, peers, and elected officials to improve the conditions for API youth and other youth of color.

Impact Highlights

AYPAL remains one of the only power building, youth organizing hubs that serve the API community specifically. While our base has been quite diverse in the past several years, the issues and the API experience is what grounds our work and our vision. AYPAL continues to support API youth and hire staff that share their experiences in order to cultivate better relationships with our base to build and contest for power. We have had key victories that have impacted our communities. From Education justice, passing disaggregated data resolutions within OUSD leading to the creation of the API office of equity. Anti displacement campaigns which lead to youth negotiating CBAs and preventing harmful development in Chinatown. And most recently a civic engagement campaign which passed and implemented the Youth vote in Oakland Unified, so that students 16 and older can vote for their school board representative.

What’s Next

Given our current political climate, maintaining our programs, growing staff capacity, and evolving our work to meet the moment and the needs of our community will be crucial to protect and uplift API youth and families in Oakland. Historically we have had up to over 10 staff and 6 sites, and currently only having 4 staff serving 2 sites we aim to strategize how to build sustainably to cultivate stability and expand the youth power building field and youth impact on social justice and movement work. AYPAL aims to continue being a foundational organization in the Oakland youth power building ecosystem and we aim to continue our work to cultivate the leaders for today.