Here's a little bit of old school SAAAC history (damn, I can't believe it's been about 10 years since we started this party):
Executive summary: Growing from a desire to increase cooperation and communication among the existing Asian American student organizations and to establish a dedicated body to advocate for and to address issues facing the Asian Pacific American community, a diverse group of Asian Americans came together to form Students in Alliance for Asian American Concerns in the Spring of 1993. SAAAC's additional purposes were to support and to encourage greater collaboration among the existing APA student organizations and to draw attention to Asian Pacific American politics, issues, and even culture (separate and apart from Asian cultural celebrations). The coalition that SAAAC represents is an embodiment of the vision and desire to explore and to find the common bonds among different ethnic-Asian Pacific Americans and to increase power and social capital through collaboration.
The (more detailed and more personal) origins: From my first year at Emory, I felt that there was a need for a more inclusive Asian Pacific American group. As a Taiwanese American Freshman (back in 1991), I didn't feel like I had a community that was truly my own: at the time, Emory only had KSA, ECSA, and ICE, and the APA community was closer to 3% of the student population. Without an ethnic-specific organization to call home, I ended up joining all three APA groups that existed. As a member (and later, officer) of these organizations, I was surprised at the lack of communication among them - often events or meetings were scheduled at the same time, making it impossible to support every group and unintentionally creating competition among the groups.
At the same time, a non-chartered group of students organized under the banner of ASM (Asian Studies Movement) was struggling with keeping their cause alive. ASM had been around since the 80's, but did not always have a consistent core of students to work on the issue of establishing Asian Studies at Emory. One of ASM's victories, though, was establishing Japanese language instruction at Emory; but by the early 90's, with the graduation of Dean Kusakabe, ASM's last true leader, the Asian Studies Movement was starting to fade, and someone needed to continue fighting for issues like Asian and Asian American studies on campus.
The coalescing of these two ideas became the spark for the formation of SAAAC. Since my freshman year, I had wanted to create some kind of Asian American organization that had more of an interested in race matters and APA issues. My roommate, Steve Shin, had similar ideas and through his work with ASM also saw a need to develop greater continuity to that and other APA struggles. The two of us set out to pitch the idea to the rest of the APA community.
Foremost, we gathered the support of friends and leaders throughout the Asian American community at Emory: Sushan Arora, Mukhti Bhatia, Eugene Goei, Sue Kim, Rebecca Lee, Vish Shastry, Bao Tran, and a handful of others that I know I'm sadly leaving out.
We held a few town hall meetings to respond to questions and concerns from the rest of the APA community, because we felt it was important to know that, at a grassroots level, SAAAC was something that was wanted and welcome. The response was positive and we were approved to move forward with a temporary charter from SGA. At the time, SAAAC's structure was designed as a coalition - it did not have authority over any of the member organizations, nor did it really have it's own membership. Instead it was comprised of the members of all the APA organizations that were willing to join SAAAC. The two cornerstone committees, though, were the concerns committee--which worked on APA studies, responded to incidents of hate crimes, hosted speakers, tried to establish APA theme housing, explored APA fraternities and sororities, advocated for APA faculty and administrator hiring as well as APA student recruitment--and the coordinating committee. The coordinating committee had one representative from each member organization and their chief purpose was to schedule with one another so that there would be no programming conflicts; the committee also became the breeding ground for development of collaborative ideas and co-sponsorship of events.
SAAAC was a success and started to develop it's own events. SAAAC was responsible for hosting APA conference, like ACAASU. It published a newsletter and initiated student demonstrations as well as joined in coalition with a number of groups and causes on matters of joint interest, such as protests by the BSA over matters of free speech and censorship.
At the time of formation, the APA student organizations at Emory included ECSA, KSA, EmViet, ICE, and ATACUS (Association of Taiwanese American College and University Students). SAAAC also sought to help establish new APA cultural groups, such as those representing Filipino Americans and Cambodian Americans.
One of the unique characteristics about SAAAC was that, on most campuses, a pan-Asian Pacific American organization was often the starting point (mostly because of low APA enrollments). You'd often see some splintering off from an Asian American organization; so that KSA, CSA, FSA, etc. would emerge subsequent to the existence of an Asian American Association. As a result, you often see a lot of division and zero-sum thinking when that happens. At Emory, we actually came together in coalition to form SAAAC; our formation story was the reverse of what happens most typically. While this path is relative rare, I've always believed that SAAAC's formation would serve as a model or, at least, a bellwether for the way the larger Asian Pacific American population could (and hopefully will) come together: wanting to unite by seeing common purpose, common issues, and the power of coalition.
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Hope you [all] are well.
Best wishes always,
Stephen