New York, NEW YORK (June 4, 2024) --  Youth Leaders at CACF’s renowned Asian American Student Advocacy Project (ASAP) will come together to present the results of their 2023-2024 advocacy campaigns to the public at a Community Briefing on June 7, 5pm at Teach for America’s offices at 25 Broadway. 

Now celebrating its landmark 20th year, ASAP was first founded in 2004 by CACF to create a space for young AAPI New Yorkers to discover how they can be self-aware and informed advocates for themselves, their communities, and their fellow public school students. 

Over the course of the school year, ASAP’s 32 Youth Leaders worked on three major campaigns – mental health, language access, and anti-bullying and harassment — that they determined were most relevant to AAPI youth in New York City public schools today. Through both research and advocacy, they hope to change the current landscape for AAPI high schoolers across the city, particularly those from immigrant and limited English proficient families.

“As CACF marks 20 years of ASAP and the power of AAPI youth advocacy, we are so proud to be able to showcase the incredible work of our Youth Leaders at this upcoming community briefing,” said CACF’s Co-Executive Directors Anita Gundanna and Vanessa Leung. “ASAP was built on the belief that our young people are experts on their own experiences and we are so pleased to be able to highlight the research they’ve done this academic year to their teachers, families, and elected officials.”

Guests to Friday’s ASAP Community Briefing include City Council Committee on Education Chair Rita Joseph and Councilmember Mercedes Narcisse, who will each present our ASAP Youth Leaders with citations from their offices. Our Youth Leaders will also receive citations from Councilmember Shekar Krishnan’s office from staff members attending the briefing.

CACF’s current ASAP Youth Leaders were selected after a vigorous application process and hail from 17 different New York City public schools from across the country. One of our most diverse cohorts ever, they also represent 15 different ethnic groups and speak eight languages.

Below, three of our Youth Leaders share what ASAP and the Community Briefing mean to them.

“As a member of the ASAP mental health campaign, my team and I worked hard over the past few months to understand the mental health needs of AAPI NYC public school students and current disparities when it comes to accessing help,” said ASAP Youth Leader Reona Alam, a senior at the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics. “I look forward to sharing everything that we learned about while doing our research on the mental health care disparities within the AAPI community. I am also excited to learn about the research that the other campaigns did and learn more about their proposed solutions.”

“The ASAP Community Briefing is the one event of the year where all of three of ASAP’s advocacy campaigns get to come together as a collective and share what we learned throughout the year about our advocacy, personal growth, and campaign findings,” said ASAP Youth Leader Julie Wu, a senior at Midwood High School who has been part of ASAP since 2022. “As a returner to ASAP, I am just as excited for this year’s community briefing as I was last year. We’ve all worked so hard this year and I’m excited we have the opportunity and space to share our findings at the community briefing.”

“I am particularly looking forward to reflecting on the progress ASAP’s language access campaign has made over the course of the year. Working every week as a team on this campaign is something that everyone should be proud of and this briefing symbolizes our efforts,” said ASAP Youth Leader and Stuyvesant High School senior Harpreet Singh. “I am eager to explain our research and why the need for language access (and the barriers to getting it) continue to exist.”

For more information, please contact Lakshmi Gandhi, CACF’s Senior Communications Coordinator, at lgandhi@cacf.org.

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