She’s helped give Asian Americans a voice in California issues. Now she’ll be honored

Community organizer Miya Yoshitani, who for years has worked to educate, inform and engage low-income Asian communities statewide, will be honored as one of the recipients of the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award on Wednesday in Sacramento.

This comes a few weeks before the presidential primary election on March 3, and the invitation to participate in the 2020 Census arriving by mail on April 1.

Yoshitani is one of the seven awardees recognized for their innovation, effectiveness, inclusiveness and leadership capacity to implement solutions tackling issues that are critical to California’s future, according to the foundation.

She is the executive director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, a 25-year-old grassroots advocacy organization based in Oakland and Richmond which is campaigning on issues that concern racial justice, economic equity and climate solutions.

Under her leadership, APEN also runs a multi-lingual Asian American voter mobilization program across the nation, and engages 20,000 voters who speak Cantonese, Mandarin, Lao, Mien, Khmu and English across the state.

This helps fill a gap in engaging communities that political parties could be ignoring due to the cost of providing language assistance and more uncertainty as to how these voters might lean politically.

People have become more familiar with APEN as phone bankers make calls multiple times a year during and between election cycles, Yoshitani said, which builds trust and makes it less likely for people who pick up the call to hang up on them. The phone bankers would inform them about local election issues and state ballot initiatives.

The census is also a focus of the year. From Feb. 29 to April 6, APEN will run a civil engagement program with 20 people phone banking statewide and knocking on people’s doors to inform and encourage participation in the Census.

While not specifically mobilizing for the primary election, APEN will ramp up its voter mobilization program in the general presidential election in November, said Marie Choi, APEN’s communications director.

Aside from electoral work and voter engagement, APEN’s recent works also put focus on neighborhood organizing, renewable energy and housing policies and to build multi-racial alliances across the state.

Organizing with APEN at a young age herself, Yoshitani was instrumental in helping hundreds of low-income residents to win a campaign that has stopped the Chevron Oil Refinery from expanding into the neighborhoods in Richmond.

Recipients of the leadership award will each be presented a $250,000 grant to support their work. Yoshitani said she will use the grant to support new organizing work and to recruit supporters to help build APEN works as well as to help other organizations to grow in new places.

“Miya is organizing AAPI leaders at a scale and depth not seen elsewhere, even with the great diversity of language, culture, and needs across these communities,” said Don Howard, president and CEO of the James Irvine Foundation. “This has translated into impressive changes that advance economic and environmental justice.”

Howard added that Yoshitani’s work has led to stronger leadership within the AAPI communities.

“She is a forward-thinker whose approach and organization shows other leaders how to more effectively and equitably elevate the voices of Californians,” he said.

When she first started as a youth organizer at APEN, Yoshitani recalled finding about the impacted health of the community members living near the Chevron Oil Refinery – many of them low-income Asian immigrants and Laotian refugees – after going there and talking to them. She as well as others were able to inform the community about the elements in smoke stacks that could affect their quality of life and health.

“While there was a history of organizations that were making the connection between poverty pollution and racism experienced by communities,” said Yoshitani, citing the West County Toxic Coalition, “no one was reaching out in different languages, especially in the Asian American and refugee communities, who were not connected to issues like this or decision makers.”

Yoshitani noted that Asians being reluctant to participate and engage in advocacy activities for their rights is a myth that does not apply to many. But there are legitimate reasons for some to be fearful.

“The fact that many immigrants are refugees, their experiences with generational trauma does cause a certain amount of reluctance or fear on confronting decision-makers,” Yoshitani said, adding that deportation targeting immigrant communities is a legitimate fear for them to speak up.

Another barrier preventing them from being more engaged in speaking to elective leaders is language access.

“They are not getting the background in the language they can act on,” Yoshitani said. “If you go to city council meetings, we are the ones who have been providing translation or interpretations during meetings and are fighting for extra time so that simultaneous interpretation can happen.”

By bringing resources and expertise that informs the AAPI community with cultural and language competence, Yoshitani said many are more willing to engage and be active in advocacy work.

APEN has been talking about expanding the local organizing to the Sacramento region, in addition to the Central Valley and Los Angeles areas, Yoshitani said.

“We need new organizations everywhere and there’s a reason all those places should have resources directed to organizing and for us,” she added.

This story was originally published February 18, 2020 at 4:00 AM.