Current Projects
From Social Justice Wiki
CHINATOWN JUSTICE PROJECT (CJP) organizes to defend Chinatown from gentrificationm which threatens to bring about large-scale displacement of low-income residents and small ethnic businesses. CJP's Long term goal is to build the power of low-income residents in Chinatown to preserve and expand low-income housing stock, to assert community self-determination over the use of public space, and to ensure a clean and healthy environment where poor people live, work and play.
CJP organizes Chinese and Latino immigrants against landlord harassment and illegal evictions. Their efforts have led to the establishment of the Manhattan Chinese Tenants Association (MCTA). CJP seeks to build multi-racial unity with other communities of color fighting gentrification, and contriibute to a citywide movement to protect communities of color as healthy community space for low-income people. Currently, it is part of the Lower Manhattan Anti-Displacement Coalition, as well as the Citywide Tenants Coalition.
WOMEN WOKERS PROJECT (WWP) organizes Asian immigrants, thousands of whom are locked into New York's "informal" service industry of sweatshops such as the garment factory, restaurant, nail salon, laundry, and home. Migrant domestic workers are excluded from protections granted by the National Labor Relations Act and other key labor laws. They do not have the legal right to organize unions.
WWP organizes against the triple jeopardy of gender discrimination, labor exploitation and exclusion, and anti-immigrant policy and practices that compel and coerce Asian immigrant women in domestic sweatshops. WWP fights for a standard contract for all domestic worker's citywide. WWP's work has also led to the establishment of an Asian Women's Leadership Institute and a Domestic Workers Union, an autonomous citywide domestic workers union that includes migrant women from all parts of Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, recognizing that New York City sweatshops are part of a pan-Third World women's industry.
YOUTH LEADERSHIP PROJECT (YLP), launched by CAAAV in 1996 after a pilot program, organizes in the Bronx for the Southeast Asian Refugee community, home to about 10,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian families. YLP has organized to defend tenants, health-care rights of immigrants and against racial and immigrant discrimination in the public education system. Each day, refugee families are cut off from welfare programs without cause or due process. Failure to provide interpreter services at welfare centers block these families from recouping their lost benefits through official channels.
YLP has fought back against punitive welfare reform through a combination of direct action, advocacy at welfare sites, community research and promoting alternative policy. YLP's efforts have led to the establishment of the Southeast Asian Welfare Rights Union, a documentary called Eating Welfare and the Southeast Asian Women's Food Cooperative. YLP has also initiated the Southeast Asian Community Freedom Training for organizers around the country working on welfare deform and anti-immigrant incarceration. Currently, YLP houses activities for youth in their headquarters and advocates for translators who speak Cambodian and Vietnamese in essential services such as clinics and hospitals.
RACIAL JUSTICE PROJECT (RJP) was launched in 1999 in response to CAAAV documentation of Police Brutality in the Asian Community. In New York City, the single greatest perpetrator of anti-Asian violence is New York City police officers. This violence comes in the form of harassment, threats, and physical attacks on Asians contributing to a day-to-day social control of immigrants. Among the most commonly victimized by police were South Asian cab drivers, Asian youth from various neighborhoods and Chinese immigrants who were moving into traditionally white working class neighborhoods.
CAAAV/RJP has played an active role in the NYC Coalition Against Police Brutality and organized several community actions aimed at highlighting state violence in Asian Communities. RJP documents, analyzes and organizes against patterns of police abuse across the city by making connections between the criminalization of immigrants, immigrant detention and incareation, and police misconduct.