Thank you. I’m incredibly honored to be here and have the work that I’ve been doing with Asian immigrant women advocates be recognized by the spring community. I also think it’s a really incredible space to be able to do the research, do the analytical work, and have the discussions to really figure out how to implement our ideas for change. So I want to start with the story of Hayek. Let’s see, this pointer goes here. Hayek first walked into the Oakland office of Asian immigrant women advocates, or AWA, in 1996, three years after leaving Guangdong, China. After her first job making shrimp dumplings in an Oakland Chinatown restaurant and a brief stint as a garment shop steamstress, two jobs that are very common for low income immigrant women, she found a job making about $20,000 a year as an electronics assembly worker in one of the region’s high tech factories. Without better English language skills, she knew that she could not find a better job, but her long hours, her often unpredictable work schedule really made it impossible for her to take English classes at the local community college. And so AWA, a small grassroots community organization in Oakland, was one of the few places that allowed her to learn English while keeping her job, which was essential in terms of her being able to support herself and her family. So since taking her first English language class at AWA, Hayek has become one of the organization’s most active, dynamic, and charismatic leaders. She routinely facilitates trainings on a variety of topics, from community organizing to the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, to AWA’s own history of organizing against garment sweatshops and for workplace health and safety. She’s participated in numerous strategic campaign activities. She’s worked with a variety of stakeholders, whether it’s people who are part of the Immigrant Rights Movement, local labor unions, local politicians, healthcare professionals, and she founded Oakland Chinatown’s first multi-ethnic, multi-racial, Tai Chi performance group. Suddenly she said she would never dream would be possible had it not been for the influence of AWA in her life. And in her own words, she says, if I never came to AWA, I would still be stuck in a cup. I would still be living like a frog in a well. So Hayek’s story really highlights critical dimensions of AWA’s community transformational organizing strategy, which the organization called CETOS for short. And CETOS is the organization’s attempt to develop a science out of their grassroots leadership model. And this is what the executive director, Yang Shin, this is how she puts it. So we can think about CETOS as AWA’s theories of change. It emphasizes that grassroots leadership development is the key mechanism for bringing about meaningful forms of democratic transformation. And it establishes a clear and transparent framework through which members like Hayek, or immigrant women workers like Hayek, can imagine their transformation from an everyday state of isolation, social marginalization and political and disenfranchisement to an uplifted state of self-activity, self-representation and collective action. And so key to the CETOS model’s efficacy are really these micro-level organizational practices that enable immigrant women to imagine and to envision and to implement how a single decision like walking into AWA’s office to take an English language class or a computer language class, a computer skills class, can really lead to a moment where a person becomes a leader in an anti-switch or a local campaign to reform garment workplaces. AWA’s emphasis on grassroots leadership really challenges conventional understandings about how to engage in meaningful and effective social change work. For those who often work on the movement front lines, as well as those who study social movements, the emphasis is often on the campaigns, the victories, the things that are quantifiable, like the number of people who are working on the movement front lines, like the number of people who spill out onto the streets. But what about the victories that cannot easily be quantified? How does a sense of individual and collective empowerment factor into what is considered a movement victory or a failure? How does a shift in the ordinary and mundane elements of everyday life, like having the confidence to speak up to your boss or having the confidence to say no to your husband or your children, or having the opportunity to actually participate in a collective process of changeling, making really factor into how we evaluate movement outcomes and impacts. So in this talk, I want to do two things. First, I want to give you some context about the research that I’ve been doing with AWA, as well as a bit about the organization. And then I want to just share three points from this research, because I know I have limited time to really illuminate how and why AWA prioritizes grassroots leadership as a social movement priority. Okay, so about the research collaboration. So I’ll get to this in a second. But basically, this is a genuine academic community research collaboration. Young, shame the executive director at AWA, approached me back in 2006 about the possibility of engaging in what she called a reflexive self-study. AWA, which was founded in 1983, had a really singular mission, which was to empower Asian immigrant women to become their own advocates of change, not to rely on others to advocate on their behalf. And this is the kind of conventional model, especially for women who work in low-income jobs, who cannot speak English or have difficulty communicating in English. And after 25 years, Young was really interested in figuring out, you know, this organization has committed 25 years to grassroots community organizing. What works and what doesn’t? How do we know that women’s lives have been transformed? This is a message that we constantly emphasize, but how do we actually evaluate the success and failure of our own work? And for Shin, the motivation was not just assessing AWA’s organizational effectiveness, but it was also about thinking about sustainability, about what an organization leaves behind. Because in Young Shin’s words, she said, some organizations make it, some don’t, but it’s what’s left behind that matters. And my own history with the organization dated back to the beginning of my graduate school years. Right from the very moment I started graduate school, I wanted to volunteer in an organization, and I volunteered at AWA’s English language classes. And essentially AWA’s language classes adopt a popular education approach. It says, if immigrant women want to learn English, let’s not just teach them how to talk to the bus driver or go to the bank or go to the post office. Let’s talk about workers’ rights. Let’s talk about immigrant history. Let’s talk about the civil rights movement. And so my relationship with AWA spanned the entire time that I was doing my PhD. And this relationship was important for several reasons. So not only had I established trust with an organization that really wanted to give me open access to analyze the inner workings of its organization over two and a half decades, but I had really emphasized the importance of participatory action research. For those of you who do academic research, many will argue that this often stays in the ivory tower. Right? Lots of really good work gets done, but it stays within really a narrow confines of academic debates. And participatory action research really moves that forward and says, researchers should also be part of a broader conversation of social justice and social change, which I think is exactly what the Frank community is interested in. So we did a bunch of things. So I worked with AWA, we did focus groups with AWA members, with Korean and immigrant, Korean immigrant and Chinese immigrant women workers, Garmin, electronics, hotel, home care. I did in-depth interviews with staff and allies. We did organizational surveys. I scoured through AWA’s organizational archives. I looked through their membership database. And basically, between 2000 and 2012, I basically told AWA, whatever you need, I will do it for you. We will figure out the questions that you want to find answers to together. And so like I said, I want to share three things. Okay. This is a really complicated chart. I’ve seen this chart in a lot of different forms. And I think actually when I gave the PowerPoint to the Frank organizers, they were like, do you have a different graph? And I often hear that. But for AWA, this is AWA’s grassroots leadership model, essentially outlined. And what it does is it outlines seven steps. What you see here is three through seven. Just couldn’t fit one into one. How do you get them to walk into the organization? But starting at C-TOS 3, what AWA has done is it links programs and activities with the kinds of skills, knowledge and experience that’s critical for enabling women not only to envision their transformation as a monolingual Chinese or Korean speaker in English dominant society, to being able to actually work with public health experts and university professors and students to lead a campaign for social change. And so what we see here is it moves from taking an English language class to doing political education trainings to participating in organizational committees, to then becoming peer teachers, peer coordinators, peer organizers, running the organization as part of the membership board, and then becoming senior trainers. And what would have really been wonderful if High End could come here and give this talk herself. Because when I ask AWA members in our focus groups, can you tell me a little bit about C-TOS, right? Isn’t this complicated? And they tell me, yeah, it is complicated. But it’s transparent. It’s like a spider’s web. Or it’s like an octopus. And we can make sense of its complexity because it tells us exactly what we need to go up to to get from level three to level four, or from level six to level seven. And it also is part of the organizational pedagogy. And not only helps them know what are the things that they can do to be the drivers of their own kind of individual transformation, but it helps them understand why the organization does certain things, right? Why it has facilitation workshops, why it has public speaking workshops, why it’s actually doing a political education on workplace health and safety training. So for this C-TOS model, what I want to emphasize is that AWA put all the work into developing the C-TOS model because it believes that leadership is an equity issue. And that’s my first point. That there is this assumption in society that leadership is kind of a natural born characteristic of really amazing individuals. But for AWA, if you’re limited English speaking, if you have to work one or two or three jobs, if you’re really just trying to make ends meet, there is no opportunity to actually become a leader. And so you have to create the space to become a leader. You have to design a plan and you have to implement it. So C-TOS was not born overnight. And my second point is that the C-TOS model is a product of organizational reflectivity. It’s a product of 15 years of AWA’s experience doing community organizing and reflection. And it really started with this campaign. Between 1992 and 1995, AWA led its Justice for Garment Workers campaign. And this was a whole page ad that was taken out in the New York Times against Jessica McClintock. And I don’t know if any of you are bridesmaids or proms, but I think back in my day it was like a really fancy place to buy a dress. Right? Is it still fancy? I don’t go to the proms anymore. And in San Francisco, Jessica McClintock had a flagship of the boutique. And really what happened is that many retail brands like Jessica McClintock, Gap, Nike, as we know, they have stopped directly employing manufacturing workers. They hire subcontractors. And this has become a global subcontracting business. And being able to outsource manufacturing work, what happens is you can outsource the legal responsibility. But for a group of Chinese immigrant women workers who made dresses for Jessica McClintock were not paid because their subcontractor won bankrupt. They argued Jessica McClintock could not share their moral responsibility. And they started a major public shaming campaign to tell Jessica McClintock let them eat lace. Or that Jessica McClintock is telling workers let them eat lace. So of course Jessica McClintock, not legally responsible, not contractually responsible, was not responsive to the demands of just a dozen Chinese immigrant workers. So this campaign really exploded for two and a half years into a major national mobilization. And what was really interesting is second generation Asian Americans, as well as other people who are concerned about social justice, became part of this mobilization. Really boycotting Jessica McClintock’s doors in San Francisco Union Square every week. And this was kind of the days before the kind of anti-switch shop movement. This is before United Students Against Switch Shop. This is one of the early campaigns. And this campaign did a lot of things. It won a lot of, it made a lot of victories. Not only did it put the issue of switch shop labor abuses against immigrant women and women in the global economy on the public agenda, but it also resulted in concrete reforms for women themselves in terms of policy makers. But there was an irony with this campaign in the sense that who became mobilized were a lot of a second generation, English speaking, university educated activists. And women workers themselves were transformed, but they were often the faces of the protest. They were often the people that gave testimony. They weren’t in the room with Robert Reich when A1 negotiates an agreement with Jessica McClintock. And so this campaign really revealed a paradox, which is A1’s committed to empowering Asian immigrant women to be their own advocates of change, yet somehow they’re left in the sidelines when it’s about escalating the public drama or negotiating the strategic assets of the campaign. So what A1 decided was to reflect on its experience in a very reactive campaign and move to a proactive model. And when I say move from a reactive to a proactive model, I’m reminded of something that Faddeus said when he started the day, which is that people have to have their own experiences. People have to live through and understand how is it that you need a movement that can transform the conditions of your own life. And so Ava did something very, I think, kind of quirky and strange, but innovative. He said, okay, well let’s actually start from the situated experience of Asian immigrant women workers. And what we found is that as many of these sweatshops that were moving from San Francisco, LA, to Mexico, to Vietnam, to China, many of the women got left behind, but their bodies have become well-worn after 10, 15, 20 years sitting in garment workstations. And so when Ava had a garment workers clinic and women would talk about neck injury and back strain and all these problems, what they realized is that they can use this knowledge to change the situation for other immigrant women workers. And so they worked with healthcare professionals, they worked with occupational health and safety researchers to design the model workstation. What would be a model garment workstation? And one of the very key things was chairs that moved, kind of like our desk chairs, to have ergonomic chairs. And so they essentially went to the subcontractors and said, can you at least put ergonomic chairs in the workstations? And they said, no, we have no money. So then Ava then went and had repeated meetings with local city council officials to say, we need to improve workplace health and safety. It’s a taxpayer issue, right? It’s a workers rights issue, it’s an issue of social justice. And they got local city officials on board with their campaign and they set up an ergonomics chair library. And so what they did was garment subcontractors didn’t have to buy their own chairs, they could actually rent them out from Ava. So this is a quirky campaign because it wasn’t like workers spilling out into the streets and really saying, you know, they demand rights. They were basically, the small Oakland Ava office was filled with these chairs, hundreds of them. You could have walked around the office, but this was their idea, right? And I think when Ava started this campaign, no one really understood or really had a sense that this campaign would really transform its members from being simply the faces or the witnesses or giving testimony about their experiences to actually being the experts and the innovators. And so for Chi-Mei, she basically started doing trainings because not only did they have to convince the subcontractors, but they had to convince their fellow co-workers that this is ergonomic health and safety is something that matters. And for Chi-Mei, she says, you know, quote, I’m very honored to run the ergonomic campaign to lead a group of women to change garment workers chairs to become more ergonomic. Ava gave us a chance to help a lot of garment workers and lead a campaign with pride, and they were even honored with multiple awards. And this was kind of part of the experience of transformation and leadership that matters. So I just want to end by saying, what’s the larger point? The points that I’ve made about Ava illustrate the labor-intensive work that goes into meaningful forms of democratic transformation. So if we’re really, truly committed to living in a society in which everyone has a voice and the means to participate, we need to put in the hard work to do so. So while Ava is just one small grassroots organization committed to this vision, the new democratic institutions, identities, and practices that are emerging and Ava’s organizing and mobilizing are part of a broader shake-up in society. Okay, I’m done. Thank you.