UTOPIA (United Territories of Pacific Islanders Alliance) Washington

The mission of UTOPIA WA is to provide sacred spaces to strengthen the minds and bodies of Queer and Trans Pacific Islanders (Q-T-PI) through community organizing, community care, civic engagement, and cultural stewardship. UTOPIA works to create a vibrant space to address basic needs, build pathways toward new expanded career and life opportunities, foster a sense of common purpose, and advocate for social justice, leadership, and wellbeing among members of the QTPI community in Washington. We envision a world of cultural wealth, dignity, healing, and liberation for QTPI that honors our ancestors and supports future generations and ourselves.

Here's the Issue:

UTOPIA’s work is steeped in the barriers, challenges, and experiences of QTPI who face pervasive racism, homophobia, and transphobia that impacts our safety, wellness, confidence, leadership potential, and positive futures. As the intersectional targets of multiple oppressions, our community faces compounded barriers to economic security and wellbeing. Within mainstream society, we are simultaneously both invisible and hypervisible as targets for discrimination, violence, and criminalization. Many Pacific Islander immigrants arrive in the US without the resources they need to survive and thrive, disconnected from their culture, community, and the power of their voices. Prevailing prejudice against transgender people of color has resulted in limited job opportunities, leading many to sex work and subsequent criminalization, which further limits opportunities for employment. As a result, our community members face a high risk of violence and abuse, as well as increased risks of COVID-19, HIV, and other health concerns, including depression and anxiety.

Our Solution:

UTOPIA’s ROOTED in Culture project is a celebration of Indigenous Pacific Islander cultures and an amplification of queer and trans Pacific Islander voices through the lens of the most significant issues impacting our community in 2021. UTOPIA practices the traditional Indigenous Pacific arts of music, dance, song, and traditional costume, generational storytelling practices and collective healing modalities that tell the stories of the loss of our land and language. They are also powerful base-building tools that elevate and celebrate the strengths, voice, creativity, beauty, and resiliency and of queer, trans, and gender diverse Native Hawai’ian and Pacific Islanders. Cultural celebration and activism intertwine organically in UTOPIA’s programs, as our leaders use our shared cultural identity as powerful tools to communicate our stories, build our collective vision, and motivate community and collective change. UTOPIA’s programs tap into the power of the collective Pasifika voice in the Northwest.

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

UTOPIA is led and founded by Native Hawai’ian and other Pacific Islander women who identify as unapologetically transgender and/or Fa’afafine (a cultural gender identity native to Samoa translated as “in the manner of a woman”), many of whom have former or current experiences in the sex trade. Our programs trust the community to lead and lean on the significant strengths of our sisterhood. The model of talanoa centers radical equality, collective accountability and champions relationship building in leaning on peers for support. The soul of our work is our connection with our community, the relationships we build and the cultural experience we share. Cultural alignment is a core principle of our work, and our cultural identity plays a big role in our decision-making. UTOPIA exists because of the fundamental necessity of the QTPI to create our own loving, accepting sisterhood and community. We truly need each other to survive.

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.