APIENC (API Equality – Northern California)

APIENC (API Equality – Northern California) builds transgender, non-binary, and queer Asian and Pacific Islander (TQAPI) power to amplify our voices and empower our communities. Through organizing, we inspire and train grassroots leaders, transform our values from scarcity to abundance, and partner with organizations to sustain a vibrant movement ecosystem. Since 2004, APIENC has trained hundreds of leaders to organize intersectional movements focused on racial justice, trans justice, community safety, and healing justice. Our work speaks to the unique experiences of those living at the intersection of transgender, queer and API identity, filling in a key gap across movements.

Here's the Issue:

Trans, non-binary, and queer APIs live at the intersection of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and economic injustices. Trans and queer APIs are gaining more visibility, but many still struggle to access stable housing, affirming workplaces, competent mental health care, stable housing, and life-affirming community. In 2019-2020, APIENC led “Up to Us,” a groundbreaking, community-based research study on the experiences of trans and non-binary API people—the largest in the country to-date. In this research, we found that 22% of respondents experienced homelessness; 70% have seriously considered suicide while 29% have attempted it; and despite pervasive violence in public and in our homes, 79% feel uncomfortable and unsafe turning to the police for help. Clearly, our community’s needs are dire; yet due to the erasure of our histories, harmful model minority myths, language barriers, and widespread isolation, violence against TQAPIs is often overlooked and solutions are underfunded.

Our Solution:

APIENC’s work is about healing across generations, developing movement leaders, and collaborating to create community safety. This includes:

Healing justice & community care: we organize projects such as intergenerational phone trees and a free peer counseling program by-and-for trans APIs to give & receive support that meets our cultural & gender needs.
Developing values-based leaders: through our 8-week Summer Organizer Program apprenticeship to our 6-week Leadership Exchange training series, we provide the skills, histories, and compassionate approaches needed to create visionary new worlds.
Creating community safety: we grow our solutions to violence by developing trained community safety teams & growing our skills through workshops on healthy relationships, conflict-resolution, and de-escalation.

Ultimately, APIENC grows the number of skilled and compassionate people working towards justice. By ensuring that our people are seen, heard, empowered, and united, we are building movements that are sustainable and effective at creating solutions for generations to come.

We're the right people to do the work because:

As an organization centered on grassroots organizing and leadership development, we believe that the people experiencing oppression are the best equipped to create long-term solutions. That’s why APIENC is an organization for trans & queer API people, by trans & queer API people. We are staffed by 4 people, all of whom are queer API people, and three of whom are young, trans API people. Our membership is primarily TQAPI people under the age of 30. We’re driven by TQAPI volunteer members who understand how we have been denied humanity and resources due to gender presentation, ethnic background, religion, immigrant status, disability, and other identities.

APIENC’s 120 active members come from all across the Bay Area, and our leaders are young, working-class, transgender, immigrant, from refugee families, and more. Every year, we train our members to be skilled organizers and we partner with over 30 organizations to advance collaborative visions.

Manisha G. Bewtra, AICP

Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor to Tucson Mayor Regina Romero

Manisha Bewtra, AICP (she/her) is Mayor Romero’s Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor. In this role, she leverages her passion for planning for thriving, healthy, and inclusive communities with her love for policy-making and politics as the Mayor’s liaison on transportation and land use issues. Manisha is an experienced public process facilitator and project manager and works collaboratively with the Mayor’s team and city departments to apply an equity lens to all city initiatives.
Manisha has built her career on bringing divergent perspectives together, facilitating conversations around change, and generating data-informed solutions that move communities forward. She is driven by public service and champions equitable policies and inclusive community engagement.
Prior to her current role, she worked at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Boston as a senior regional planner and the manager of the analytics team, at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership where she was a statewide technical assistance provider, as an adjunct city planning instructor for Master’s degree program courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at Arizona State University, and in municipal government and nonprofit community development organizations in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chandler, Arizona.
Manisha has served on various equity-focused organizations and committees and is a graduate of Emerge Massachusetts, the Initiative for Diversity in Civic Leadership, and the Massachusetts Commonwealth Seminar, three organizations dedicated to training underrepresented groups to influence public policy and to run for office. She has a Master of City Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA in Economics and Art from The University of Iowa, and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. She currently serves as a member at large for the American Planning Association Arizona Southern Section and is a member of the executive team for the Asian American and Political Islander Caucus for the Arizona Democratic Party.
Before moving to Tucson in the summer of 2020, she lived in the Boston area for twelve years. During her years in Melrose, Massachusetts, she served as a Human Rights Commissioner and subsequently as a City Councilor. When elected to the Melrose City Council, she became the first person of color ever to serve in elected office in Melrose. She grew up in Iowa and identifies as Desi/Indian-American. She, her husband, and her son felt welcomed and right at home in Tucson when they moved here – even in spite of a pandemic and searing summer heat.

Arnie Saiki

research, writer, program director

Broadly focusing on regional economic and geopolitical themes in the Asia and Pacific regions, Arnie Saiki is currently leading a working group on data, statistics and valuation in the Pacific. His book “Economic and Ecological Accounting: Towards Intemerate Values,” was published last year by the Pacific Conference of Churches, the Pacific Theological College and the University of the South Pacific.

Since the publication, this campaign has been introduced to the Ecological and Economic Justice program at the World Council of Churches and he is participating in a G8 Interfaith forum for the inclusion of Wellbeing indicators into our economic accounts.

While national statistics and ecological accounting normally fall under the purview of government, academic or international institutions, Arnie has been campaigning in democratizing our ecological data, seeking support for a proof-of-concept accounting program that would enable poor, impacted, and indigenous peoples to actively participate in how we account for our socio and economic biodiversity. Intemerate Accounting is an equation that helps to correct accounting disparities that have, to a large extent, excluded the Global South. Revising our accounting system can provide access and opportunities that cross wide campaign sectors, bringing hope, action and efficacy to reverse climate change, restore our ecological biodiversity, and redistribute global wealth more equitably.

Arnie has been actively promoting and working on global justice campaigns since 2007 when he received a “We the People” grant from the Hawai’i Council of the Humanities for his work on Hawai’i Statehood. He has organized conferences with Hawaiian national independence groups, managed the Save Rapanui campaign after the Chilean military forced a lockdown of Easter Islanders. Arnie spoke at the World Bank representing the Pacific Island Forum, and participated in discussions around regionalism in the Pacific. He was recently appointed the US-Pacific Diplomacy and Solidarity Mission for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), and is on the management team of the Deep Seabed Mining Campaign.

In 2011, Arnie received the blessing from Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell to organize a counter-conference in Honolulu while APEC was there and coordinated the Moana Nui conferences, an international partnership between the International Forum on Globalization and Pua Mohala I Ka Po. For the last ten years he has been campaigning on issues around trade, development, ecological resources, indigenous issues and militarization in the Pacific.

His essays, “TPP at the End of the Line: a briefing on economic cooperation and capacity building” was published in American Quarterly by John Hopkins University Press, and “Manifesting the Liquid Continent,” was published by Yunnan National University, as part of the 1st International conference on Asia and Pacific Ethnology and Anthropology.