December 1, 2008
APANO API VOTE OREGON REPORT
OVERVIEW
APANO is the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon. It is a membership-based advocacy organization founded in the late 1990’s by activists from the Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Lao, and Filipino communities. APANO is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to civic involvement and Pan-Asian leadership development. We undertook a base-building campaign in 2007 and prepared to use the 2008 election to accomplish the following goals:
· Reconnect with long-time active community members
· Develop/ deepen relationships with other API groups in Oregon
· Identify emerging leadership
· Educate communities on the electoral process, the importance of voting, and on the impact of an anti-immigrant ballot measure
· Register new voters
· Mobilize API voters, and
· Recruit new members for APANO.
By many accounts, we completed a successful API Vote Oregon campaign. This non-partisan effort to register, educate and turnout Asian/Pacific Islander voters reached over 2,000 API’s in Oregon.
VOTER REGISTRATION
APANO engaged and coordinated with numerous long-standing API community organizations to organize series of voter registration activities. Starting with a small core of volunteers, we actively engaged API contacts at Asian American cultural festivals, student leadership conferences, board meetings, community events, worship services, and among others. Many conversations led to exciting new partnerships with groups where there was no historical working relationships with APANO, and encouraged new folks to begin volunteering for APANO and provided the entry for stronger engagement throughout the whole electoral campaign. These organizations include:
Making 600 contacts with API voters, we registered 225 voters before the registration deadline.
One of our first voter registration activities was at the Asian American Youth Leadership conference held every summer. Three hundred fifty young people come to this event and many were excited to be voting for the first time and enthusiastically signed up to be on our alert brigade. This was an important relationship to deepen and we are now looking forward to working more closely with the organizers of this event to provide these youths with more civic engagement opportunities.
TRAINING STAFF ORGANIZERS & VOLUNTEERS
In order to support the campaign and accomplish our electoral organizing goals, we built an infrastructure that would accomplish the following: (1) provide us coverage for all the activities scheduled, (2) allow us flexibility and enable us to be responsive to opportunities as they occur and to communities as they expressed interest, and (3) tier our support and supervision of volunteers/ leaders as they began to step up. We hired 3 part-time interns/ organizers who, despite their youth, were already seasoned peer organizers in their communities. In addition, we had a board of 5 venerable API community leaders who have deep relationships in diverse communities and experience in civic engagement and community organizing. We had three professional API community organizers volunteer their time and skills to mentor and provide support to these staff organizers, one of whom volunteered to be the project manager for the whole campaign. We all worked to find other volunteers who would offer the time needed to staff the activities we’d organized, be possible APANO recruits/members and potential APANO leaders.
Two trainings recruited 50 volunteers who agreed to register family and friends and host ballot parties. Information and materials were provided on the fundamentals of voter registration and mobilizing people to vote. The trainings provided information as well on Measure 58, a ballot measure which would have impacted immigrant and refugee children by limiting ESL funding to public schools. Hosts were trained to speak on the consequences of Measure 58 and use talking points that hoped to move voters to vote No on Measure 58.
Two community leaders from different communities exemplify the range of folks we began to work with: Roselle, a young Filipino student organizer who was experienced in organizing youth events at her university, and June, who was the former executive director of the Nikkei Legacy Center. Both had tremendous experience working with their peers but had rarely been in intergenerational or intercultural spaces like APANO before. The activities they began to participate in excited them and showed them the breadth and depth of the rewards that organizing across generations and communities promises.
VOTER EDUCATION
APANO participated in both the grassroots and mainstream campaigns for No on Measure 58, providing input and feedback on messages and strategies to outreach API voters. All the ballot parties APANO organized contained significant voter education pieces that described the impact of Measure 58. To this end, we designed and translated materials (Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese), phone banking scripts, buttons, stickers, banners and the like. This work also enabled us to build and deepen relationships with other immigrant/ refugee groups working on the campaign, such as:
Each ballot party organized contained at least 15 minutes of voter education on Measure 58, while others provided basic info on the other ballot measures. This was particularly critical to first time and infrequent voters who were not aware of the issues being deliberated on in the initiatives.
We also organized a candidate forum for immigrant and refugee communities, along with CIO and Latino Network. We were successful in inviting candidates from both local and state races. 6 candidates appeared and participated in the forum which was attended by 20 community members (see www.apano.org for partial group photo) and 25 other community leaders from Latino and Slavic communities. Critical questions on education, immigration reform, youth and family services, and community policing were posed and responded to by the candidates.
VOTER MOBILIZATION
The Voter Volunteer Trainings that we held allowed us to identify 50 ballot party hosts who agreed to hold a gathering, organize the logistics and outreach, and support the voter education piece facilitated by one of our 6 APANO interns/ organizers. Of those fifty, 35 ballot parties were actually held. We identified many more prospective API activists and APANO members from those who came to these events and feedback was extremely positive from those who participated.
A series of 6 phone banking sessions were also organized, galvanizing 26 volunteers to make 1000 calls to API voters who had not yet turned in their ballots.
From the growing pool of contacts and potential API activists, we invited people to participate in a powerful direct action, hand delivering our mail-in ballots together on Nov 4th to the Multnomah County elecions office. 19 activists joined us and we were able to receive some media attention from KATU (ABC affiliate) Channel 2 TV.
These activities were then capped with a celebration recognizing our volunteers and leaders, hosted by an esteemed community leader and elder. 30 folks came together to celebrate and recognize the hard work done by all, the energy generated within the communities, and the leaders across generations and cultures who stepped up to take responsibility for various pieces of the campaign.
Lisa, was a first time voter having recently become a naturalized citizen. She was intimidated by and confused by the large number of ballot measures she had to vote on in Oregon. She came to the party with her ballot and was incredibly grateful for the information on the measures that the APANO host provided. She was also greatly put at ease by the festive atmosphere of the party, happy to meet new folks within the API community and demystify the whole vote-by-mail process she was just learning about.
POST ELECTION CAPACITY BUILDING
The increase in membership and volunteer activity in the 2008 electoral cycle has built our capacity in the following ways: 1) future board recruitment and 2) established and enhanced and functional member database. We will continue to broaden our reach throughout the state by approaching and engaging additional API community organizations and groups, with the intention of creating a sustainable network of API's in Oregon in order to make strategic poltical and social gains for our communities.