The Oakland-based New Breath Foundation has announced the launch of a $10 million fund to address racialized violence against the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community by supporting power building, cross-racial solidarity, and healing between AAPI and Black, Indigenous, and other people of color communities.

Launched in partnership with the East Bay Community Foundation, the We Got Us Fund will work to boost power-building capacity among AAPI and other BIPOC racial justice movements, increase opportunities to strengthen cross-racial solidarity and cultivate healing, and support development of leadership pipelines for survivors of crime and violence and formerly incarcerated individuals. In addition to providing funding to community-based organizations, the foundation will help lead the effort to build a racial justice movement infrastructure that will sustain grassroots organizing strategies over the long term. A community advisory committee primarily comprising formerly incarcerated AAPI leaders and survivors of violence will help devise a national grantmaking approach to provide resources to grassroots organizations.

"We must be fearless in building a pathway toward collective liberation by investing in organizations that are often invisible and underresourced," said New Breath Foundation founder and president Eddy Zheng. "It is time to lift up and empower our AAPI communities who have, for too long, been overlooked because of the model minority myth."

"Our support of organizations such as New Breath Foundation will focus their work on investing in community healing and solidarity building efforts throughout the state," said California Endowment president Robert K. Ross. "We know this investment will inspire others in philanthropy to invest more readily in AAPI organizations, such as New Breath Foundation, so they can build a new generation of organizers who can carry on the long legacy of activism and racial solidarity deeply rooted in the Asian American and Pacific Islander experience."

(Photo credit: New Breath Foundation)