The National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum is the only multi-issue, progressive, community organizing and policy advocacy organization for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women and girls in the United States.
Our Mission
The National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF, pronounced “NAP-off”) builds collective power with AAPI women and girls so that we can have full agency over our lives, our families, and our communities.
In 1996, a group of 100 AAPI women came together to establish an organization that would amplify AAPI women’s stories and experiences. NAPAWF’s “founding sisters” recognized that the voices of AAPI women all too often went unseen and unheard. They founded NAPAWF to center our lived experiences within the broader public narrative. More than 25 years later, NAPAWF continues this mission by empowering AAPI women and girls to shape policy, influence cultural change, and gain agency over every aspect of our lives.
Today, with active members and supporters across the United States, we are mobilizing and building power to create social, political, and economic change for AAPI women and girls.
NAPAWF builds power and creates change by focusing on key issues:
Economic Justice and equal pay for AAPI women and families to thrive.
Immigrant Rights for families to thrive with access to quality and affordable healthcare regardless of their immigration status.
Racial Justice for AAPIs and all people of color to live free from hate and racism.
Theory of Change
NAPAWF’s work is guided by our theory of change – our overall strategy for advancing our mission to build power with AAPI women and girls. Watch this video to learn more about how NAPAWF staff and chapters work to build a movement that advances reproductive justice values for our communities.
We approach our work with a reproductive justice lens.
Reproductive justice is a social movement rooted in the belief that all individuals deserve the resources and autonomy to make the best decision for their families and communities. A reproductive justice lens recognizes that each person’s lived experiences are shaped and informed by intersecting identities that can ultimately affect the choices they make about their lives and future, including having or not having children.
NAPAWF was created in 1996 by the Founding Sisters, a group of over 100 AAPI women who came together to establish an organization that would amplify our stories and experiences. Learn more about our history by watching the video or exploring the interactive timeline below.
The UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was a powerful gathering of global women activists. Asian American and Pacific Islander advocates who attended made two profound realizations:
First, although they were gathered in an Asian country, they had no organized voice representing AAPI women at the conference.
Second, the issue wasn’t just international. Many leaders at the conference advocated for issues crucial to the AAPI community — health and safety, economic justice, civil and LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, equal educational access, and immigrant and refugee rights. Yet their work was fractured across regions and issue areas in the United States, limiting their effectiveness.
Coming together one night of the conference in a rain-soaked suburb of Beijing, 100 Asian American and Pacific Islander women pledged to to build a national, progressive, and multi-issue movement of AAPI women and girls in the United States.
One year later, 157 women became the founding sisters of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum at a gathering in Los Angeles.
The founding sisters organized regional chapters, formed an interim leadership structure, and identified six key issues that are still critical to our work today: health, civil rights, economic justice, educational access, ending violence against women, and immigrant and refugee rights.
NAPAWF operated as an all-volunteer group for our first seven years. In 2003, Kiran Ahuja was hired as our first Executive Director, and over the next few years she transformed the organization to a staffed nonprofit.
We commissioned an artist to represent and celebrate the source of our joy and endurance: AAPI women. That is how our “dancing woman,” as we affectionately call her, was born.
Our dancing woman unites the advocacy we practice today with a long, diverse lineage of movement and dance. Her arms lift up our rich heritage; her body spins in a motion commonly found in traditional Asian folk dances; her face looks outward, at the bright future we are working to create. With her dance, she embodies our commitment to connectedness — and to the project of empowering every AAPI woman to live as her whole, authentic self.
Since 2003, the dancing woman has served as NAPAWF’s logo.
Purvi Patel, an Indian American woman from Indiana, was incarcerated in 2015 when the state charged her with feticide and neglect of a dependent after she had a negative pregnancy outcome outside of a medical setting. She was the first woman in the U.S. to be convicted and sent to prison for feticide along with the contradictory charge of child neglect.
At the time, she was one of only two women who had been charged with feticide under the Indiana law. Both were Asian American women, despite the fact that abortion and miscarriage happen throughout the state and across races, and that only two percent of the state population is Asian.
NAPAWF joined other Asian American and women’s health leaders supported Patel by filing an amicus brief and gathering in Indianapolis to rally at her hearing before the Indiana Court of Appeals. The Indiana Court of Appeals overturned her conviction, ruling that the General Assembly never intended to criminalize women who have abortions. Patel was released from prison on September 1, 2016.
2018 was the first year that NAPAWF conducted our voter engagement program. That year, we reached out to AAPI women voters in Gwinnett County, Georgia, to help people learn about the election and make sure they were registered to vote.
In 2020 and 2022, NAPAWF expanded our voter engagement program in Georgia, Florida, Texas, and other key states to ensure AAPI women voters know everything they need to cast a ballot. Our work is unique in that we bring a pan-Asian, intergenerational, and personal approach to voter outreach efforts, including reaching voters in native Asian languages, creating multilingual voting guides, and connecting voters to issues that impact their families and communities.
On March 16, 2021, eight people, including six Asian American women, were killed in shootings at three Atlanta-area spas.
The Asian American women murdered in these shootings faced a specific racialized and gendered violence for being Asian women and massage workers. The shooter targeted spas in the Asian community, blaming them for his “addiction to sex” – a deadly and disgusting racialized sexualization of Asian women.
In response, NAPAWF held vigils to grieve with our communities in Atlanta and across the country and worked to reshape the public narrative and humanity of AAPI women.
