Highlighting the work of NAKASEC

The National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC) was founded in 1994 by low-income, Korean American youth to respond to rising attacks on immigrants and to build a strong, progressive voice that could impact federal policy. Today, NAKASEC has affiliates working in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Illinois, and California to organize Korean and Asian Americans to achieve social, racial and economic justice.

NAKASEC has long advocated for increased rights for immigrants including strengthening DACA and citizenship for all. In 2017, NAKASEC community leaders participated in a 22 day, 24 hours per day rally outside of the White House demanding that the Trump administration defend DACA. More recently, NAKASEC’s citizenship4all campaign just finished 100 days of action calling on the Biden administration to legislate a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and end all detentions and deportations.

NAKASEC also uses GetThru tools to achieve its civic engagement goals. In 2020, NAKASEC and their Pennsylvania affiliate Woori Center made over 180k phone calls and sent over 75k texts to Pennsylvania voters, reaching 38% of the state’s Asian American voters. This work proved to be integral to Joe Biden’s success in Pennsylvania, where he won by just 80k votes. NAKASEC and their affiliates have also used our tools to provide COVID-19 resources to Korean and Asian American communities.

I have included some more resources below, but I invite others to share information about AAPI-led organizations and/or individuals they admire:

• More information about NAKASEC can be found here and you can follow their excellent twitter here.
• The Asian-American Activism you Won’t See on Instagram
• Nodutdol is a community of NYC Koreans focused on a struggle against war and militarism (especially as it relates to the United States’ actions in Korea). ‍
• Here is their Zine on the failed U.S-DPRK summit of 2019