YWCA Cambridge Honors AANHPI Heritage Month
By: Tiffany Wong, Board Member
YWCA demands justice and provides support to diverse communities across the country, with the vision of forging a world where women, girls, and people of color can thrive. Observances such as Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AANHPIHM) allow us to celebrate, reflect, and uplift a community that has often been barred from, and unacknowledged in, the history of the United States and the YWCA.
One example of this complicated history was the creation of the first independent Japanese YWCA in the U.S. in 1912 to address social and service needs of Japanese women and children when they were barred from use of key facilities in the main San Francisco YWCA chapter due to segregationist policies. With donations from the national and SF YWCA, as well as funds from the Japantown community, the women hired noted architect Julia Morgan to design a building completed in 1932. The Japanese women asked the SF YWCA to hold the title of the property in trust for the Nikkei (Japanese people who emigrated from Japan and their descendants) community because California’s Alien Land Law prevented Issei (first-generation Japanese people who immigrated to America) from owning property. When Executive Order 9066 forcibly removed and incarcerated all people of Japanese ancestry from California during WWII, the building was turned over to the SF YWCA. The building then became a location that hosted many gatherings that furthered multiple political and social causes, including the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the fight for LGBTQ+ rights. Later, inspired by the 1980s campaign for Japanese American redress, a multi-generational group of Japanese Americans successfully led a legal struggle to regain title to the building so that the building could once again be used for the benefit of the Japanese American community.
Another example was the Chinese YWCA in America, located in SF, recognized by YWCA USA in 1916. It served as an important social outlet for many Chinese American women, providing them with a sense of community, translation help and other services. Ethnically Chinese people were often segregated until the 1960s when the Civil Rights Movement and less draconian immigration laws allowed better integration into the broader community. By the 1980s, the building (also designed by Julia Morgan) was in disrepair and no longer served its previous function. It was then donated to the Chinese Historical Society of America in the 1990s to house its museum. Watch this video to understand how the Chinese YWCA evolved as the needs of the community evolved.
These two examples illustrate the complicated relationship between the Asian American community and the YWCA, which both supported Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women, while othering them.
As YWCA USA states “At YWCA, we know that we cannot empower all women unless we work to eliminate racism. More than 50 years after Dr. Dorothy Height introduced YWCA’s One Imperative — to eliminate racism, wherever it exists, by any means necessary — the ideal of ‘One YWCA’ continues its forward movement toward racial justice. With leaders such as Dr. Height — YWCA’s first Director of Racial Justice — who blazed the trail ahead, we look to her words as we continue our work to eliminate racism and empower women. Dr. Height once said: “If the times aren’t ripe, you have to ripen the times. We have to realize we are building a movement.” Through our current work to advance racial justice by combining programming and advocacy to generate institutional change, we are proud to continue building upon Dr. Height’s legacy of racial justice — Until Justice Just Is.
At YWCA, the AAPI community is an integral part of our staff, volunteers, and communities. We celebrate the timely passage of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which will take important steps toward ending the hate, bigotry, and violence AAPI communities have experienced…YWCA is proud to have advocated alongside our partners in the effort to make this critical piece of legislation a reality. Now we can celebrate while looking ahead at how we can continue meeting the needs of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders across the country, work that we have been proudly doing in many communities throughout our history.” Learn more about how the YWCA network continues to empower, protect, and support AAPI communities across the nation here."
2023 AANHPI Heritage Month Theme
This year’s theme is Advancing Leaders Through Opportunity.
To honor these contributions and celebrate AANHPIHM, I am thrilled to showcase two YWCA Cambridge leaders from the AANHPI community who make all we do possible.
Cassandra Ling (she/her), Executive Director
Cassandra Ling is the Executive Director of the YWCA Cambridge. She was most recently Chair of the YWCA Cambridge's Board of Directors after having joined the Board in 2018. Prior to stepping into her current role, Cassandra launched and supported workforce development programs in the Berkshires and Washington, DC and expanded girls empowerment initiatives in Morocco. In her spare time she stays busy chasing her toddler around the apartment and enjoys walking along the Charles with her family.
Puja Kranz-Howe (he/him), Advocacy and Youth Leadership Manager
Puja joined the YWCA Cambridge in December 2019 and leads the Advocacy Department and Youth Programing. Puja is always eager to have conversations about anti-racism, identity, systems of power, and questioning societal norms, especially with middle and high schoolers. In his free time, he loves to cook and write poetry.
I would like to highlight two other AANHPI women affiliated with the YWCA.
“We have to build things that we want to see accomplished, in life and in our country, based on our own personal experiences to make sure that others do not have to suffer the same discrimination.”
- Patsy Mink, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 8, 1975
Patsy T. Mink, the first woman of color elected to Congress, met her supporters at Laniākea over the years. She was also honored at YWCA Oahu’s Leader Luncheon in 1987 together with Mary Kawena Pukui. (Honolulu Star-Bulletin: November 7, 1990). Learn more about Patsy Mink here.
“I could not turn back the time for political change, but there is still time to save our heritage. You must remember never to cease to act because you fear you may fail. The true secret is to know your own worth. It will carry you through many dangers.”
– Queen Lili’uokalani
YWCA O'ahu membership card of Queen Liliʻuokalani, the first and last sovereign queen of Hawaii, since she was forced to abdicate in January 1893, when a group of American businessmen called the Committee of Safety, backed by U.S. Marines staged a coup against her, charging her with treason. For the rest of her life, she continued to work to preserve native Hawaiian rights and traditions and support the Hawaiian people. She established a bank for women, a fund for the education of native Hawaiian girls, as well as The Queen Lili‘uokalani Trust to support Hawaiian orphans, which is still thriving today, and continued to support the YWCA, and the work it was doing, until she passed away in 1917. Learn more about her here.
Learn more about Asian/Pacific American (AAPI) Heritage Month, which was chosen to commemorate the immigration of the first Japanese to the United States on May 7, 1843 and the anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869, whose tracks were largely laid by Chinese immigrants.