AAPI Heritage Month Spotlight: Philanthropy for Asian American Action Chicago

In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, the Trust is spotlighting AAPI leaders and AAPI-serving organizations who are making a difference in the Chicago region.

Philanthropy for Asian American Action Chicago (PAAAC) is an affinity group that supports AAPI leaders becoming catalysts and advocates for racial justice by organizing people, dollars, and resources to address and build community-led solutions to system inequities faced by the AAPI community. The organization also advocates for racial justice in solidarity with other communities of color in philanthropy. As a grant recipient under the Building Collective Power strategy, PAAAC aims to bolster its work through partnerships, programming that celebrates AAPI culture, and piloting a mentorship program between AAPI nonprofit leaders and key figures in philanthropy.

In this Q&A with PAAAC Project Manager Rupal Soni, she discusses her organization’s priorities, the importance of working in solidarity across communities of color, and the AAPI leaders who influence her.

Tell us about your role and the work of PAAAC.

Rupal Soni: We organize people, dollars, and resources to uplift AAPI communities at all levels in this city in ways that center community-led solutions to systemic inequities, embrace abundance, and reject the scarcity mindsets that pit communities against one another. In the last few years, there’s been quite a movement to bring more diverse voices into philanthropy. I work with the amazing leaders on PAAAC’s steering committee to build programs to help us utilize and leverage our positional power to advocate for racial justice in celebration with our BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) colleagues in philanthropy.

Why is it important to be working in solidarity with other communities of color?

RS: Solidarity with other communities of color is critical, especially as we navigate the national blowback to all we’ve collectively endured the last few years. Many funding institutions are substantially rolling back the racial equity and justice initiatives that they were pouring into wholeheartedly just a few years ago.

We work closely with our sister affinity groups – Chicago Latines in Philanthropy (CLIP) and Chicago African-Americans in Philanthropy (CAAIP) – because we recognize this work is intersectional. Racial justice work can be challenging for people of color because the work is also our lived experiences. We often proactively collaborate to create collective care, celebration, and strategy spaces. Many participants from our last joint program said it felt refreshing and rare to be in a room where they could exhale and put their guard down in an honest conversation about philanthropy.

We also just started an exciting new pilot program that we hope to expand. It’s a series of trainings on racial capitalism as a framework to understand why so many of our experiences as communities of color are shared by design. We hope a shared understanding and awareness can help us move to collective strategies and action.

As a grant recipient of the Trust, part of the work being funded includes a mentoring program. Can you talk more about that?

RS: We’re in the process of dreaming up a peer mentorship program between AAPI folks in the funding community and nonprofit leadership. Currently, we are doing a landscape scan of the local and national mentorship programs that already exist to learn about what is already available and where there might be gaps we can fill. We will also conduct focus groups to understand better what our AAPI leaders need and want.

We intend to make mentorship as accessible as possible – so many brilliant, local AAPI leaders in philanthropy and nonprofit leadership can learn from each other. We also want the program to break down some of the funding and power dynamics that we know are real. Because, often, positional power is arbitrary, based on who is in what job at a specific time, and doesn’t necessarily reflect a person’s experience, skills, or understanding of the field.

It’s also an opportunity to explore how we might be able to build collective care in a cohort setting. Like our BIPOC colleagues, AAPI leaders must work on multiple levels simultaneously navigating funding and power dynamics, and often have to toe the line between our safety and our integrity. We’re hoping the mentorship program can become a safe space for candid conversations as much as it is an opportunity to plan out career trajectories.

Through the lens of your work, what would a blue-sky vision for the future of communities of color look like?

RS: The North Star is always about racial equity, justice, and liberation. Everyone should be able to feel safe, in community, and thriving. I’m honored to dream, design, and build programs alongside PAAAC’s amazing steering committee toward that vision.

This field is filled with vibrant, fierce, aligned, tireless advocates for change working with us and our sister affinity groups. My go-to question is, “What would you do if you didn’t have to do this work? What would you do if you weren’t fighting the good fight?” The answers are always lovely and heartbreaking because of all the things people could and should be doing instead. Colleagues who would love to throw block parties, open restaurants, design clothing, or tend the community’s gardens and kids. It’s a hokey answer, but I think about what could be made possible if we weren’t so busy fighting systems to ensure everyone can thrive. That’s blue-sky for me.

In the spirit of AAPI month, are there any leaders or icons who inspire you?

RS: I am endlessly inspired by Arundhati Roy’s work. She is an award-winning author and a fierce, unapologetic activist for global liberation movements and environmental justice. She’s worn so many hats over the course of her lifetime and continues to iterate, but she has never backed down from saying the true, just, brave thing. I’ve also met her, and it was a fan-girl moment.

I’m also endlessly inspired by the matriarchs in my family that came before me, specifically my mom and both my grandmothers. They’re just great, loving examples of living in their integrity and rising from the ashes again and again. I learned so much by witnessing how they lived. It’s beautiful to think the lessons I learned from them likely echo those who came before them. The shoulders that come before me are humbling.