Founded in 1979, the Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW) is a political home for pan-Asian communities in Greater Boston. We are a member-led organization committed to building grassroots power through political education, creative expression, and issue-based and neighborhood organizing.
2024 marks AARW's 45th anniversary as a movement and power building organization in the Greater Boston Area. Throughout our 45 year history, we have continued to remain nimble and adaptable to the constantly shifting social and political landscape in order to respond to the needs of our communities. Within the past decade, through our anti-displacement framework, AARW has honed in on organizing and mobilizing our communities on issues of housing justice, immigrant justice - particularly fighting Southeast Asian deportations, policing and surveillance, and environmental justice. AARW organizes working-class pan-Asian communities, with particular focus on engaging Vietamese tenants in Dorchester, Southeast Asian and South Asian youth and young adults, queer and trans Asian folks, and formerly incarcerated Southeast Asian refugees facing deportation.
We see the threat of rising rents and gentrification, mass detentions and deportations, overpolicing and incarceration, and climate catastrophe, are all forms of displacement that continues to forcibly remove our people from their loved ones, families, neighborhoods, and communities. We continue to organize against the structural violence our communities are experiencing, to keep each other safe, because we are building towards a reality where our people and communities can live full, healthy and thriving lives.