How To Support Chicago’s AAPI Community Right Now image

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How To Support Chicago’s AAPI Community Right Now

Donations, new initiatives, and more ways for you to support.

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and we’re going to be celebrating with essays, product recommendations, guides to Vietnamese restaurants and regional dishes, and much more. But first, we want to talk about how you can support Chicago’s Asian Community right now.

Since the onset of the Covid outbreak in early 2020, hate crimes and violence towards our country’s AAPI communities have devastatingly spiked. According to NBC, a recent report released by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found that anti-Asian hate crimes have increased by 169% in 2021.

Just this last Saturday, a man drove into a group of picnickers in Logan Boulevard while shouting anti-Asian American comments, seriously injuring one woman.

On March 16th, eight people were killed in a series of mass shootings at three massage parlors in Atlanta - six of those people were Asian women.

In February, 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee was attacked and killed in SF. In Oakland Chinatown, a 91-year-old man was viciously shoved to the ground. On the subway in Manhattan, 61-year-old Noel Quintana was randomly slashed in the face with a razor while on his way to work. And in Portland, more than a dozen Asian-owned businesses had their windows smashed.

Meanwhile, India is experiencing the world’s worst spike in Covid-19 cases, and Indian Americans with sick and dying family members back home are trying to help them find hospital beds, medicine, and care to survive the crisis.

If you’re interested in local organizations, and ways to support the AAPI community as a whole, check out these groups:

Other Ways You Can Help:

  • Check out Red Canary Song. This international organizing group works with Asian and other migrant sex workers on labor rights and mutual aid. In addition to fighting for labor rights, they seek to abolish police raids and the deportation and criminalization of sex workers.

  • Visit National Asian Pacific American Women’s Foundation, Atlanta Chapter NAPAWF advocates for social, political, and structural change for Asian American and Pacific Islander women and girls, by fighting for reproductive and immigrant rights, closing the wage gap, and more.

  • If you want to support directly, Unicef USA is accepting donations to provide medical supplies like PPE kits and oxygen concentrators to healthcare workers in India.

  • Continue to support Asian-owned restaurants by ordering takeout (directly from the restaurant when you can), and tipping well.

  • Follow Asian Americans Advancing Justice to hear about how to stand in solidarity with the Asian community.

  • Report any hate crimes you might witness to Stop AAPI Hate using this link.

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