Constructing a Pipeline from the Classroom to the Community

by Paolo Esteban
Community Organizer

As APANO continues to grow, our organizing team is putting special attention in our programs to build more multi-generationally. Classroom to Community, or C2C, is an emerging group of Asian and Pacific Islander college students that come from several schools in the Portland Metro area including Portland State, Portland Community College, Warner Pacific, University of Portland and more. The purpose of the group is to:

• Create a space for Leadership and Professional development. This includes Political education workshops, leadership retreats, and other opportunities to build with other APANO members and staff.

• Create a space for API College students to influence APANO’s direction. APANO has done an exceptional job in having members be apart of the planning process of what our organization should be prioritizing and look like. It’s great to have buy in from younger generations as well.

• A space where College API students can work on whatever it is College API students want to work on. This is a space for college students to identify what their issues are, and work together to figure out ways to tackle those issues. For some of our first time renters we worked with the Community Alliance of Tenants to hone in on our renters rights. For incoming college students we created a workshop to address helping 1st gen API students prepare for higher education. We are now in the process of creating our first grassroots campaign to address the lack of API student services in most universities.

As we move forward in our goal to achieve social justice for API communities across the state, I would like to thank everyone in the APANO family for helping support the growth of our younger generations, and future generations to come.