We are a 501(c)(3) public charity that gives AAPI community organizations the media and marketing support they cannot afford to buy.
To cultivate a stronger, more united, and visible AAPI community by providing local organizations, artists, educators, and advocates with the professional media and marketing infrastructure they need to thrive.
Across the country, AAPI communities are held together by organizations that operate almost entirely on volunteer labor. A lunar new year festival that draws two thousand people is often planned by six people around a kitchen table. A language school teaching a hundred children on Saturday mornings may be run by two retired teachers and a spreadsheet. A mutual aid network that delivered groceries through a crisis might have no website at all.
These organizations do not have a marketing problem in the way a business does. They have an attention problem. The work is already excellent. The people who would show up for it, volunteer for it, or fund it simply never hear that it exists. A festival gets three days of promotion on a personal Facebook page. A fundraiser reaches the two hundred people already on an email list. A cultural exhibit closes without a single person outside the immediate community walking through the door.
Meanwhile the tools that would fix this are priced for institutions. A marketing agency retainer costs more in a month than most of these groups spend in a year. Professional photography, campaign design, paid social distribution, an events platform, an email system that does not look like it was built in 2009 — each of these is individually affordable to a mid-sized nonprofit and individually out of reach for a grassroots one.
The result is a two-tier system. Well-resourced organizations become more visible, which makes them easier to fund, which makes them more visible still. Everyone else stays invisible regardless of the quality of their work. The gap is not about merit. It is about who could afford to be seen.
We do not consult, advise, or train. We do the work and hand it over.
The AAPI Network operates as shared marketing infrastructure. Rather than each small organization trying to build capability it will use twice a year, we build that capability once and make it available to all of them. This is the same logic behind a shared commercial kitchen or a fiscal sponsor: the fixed costs are enormous for one group and trivial when divided across fifty.
Strategic digital campaigns built and executed for member organizations. We handle the design, the copy, the scheduling, and the distribution. Members receive finished work, not recommendations about what they should do themselves.
Placement of events, cultural celebrations, and community initiatives across our digital platforms and community calendar. A single submission reaches audiences an individual organization would need years to assemble.
Written and visual profiles of AAPI leaders, organizations, and the people they serve. Most grassroots groups have never had anyone document what they do. The absence of that record makes the work harder to fund and easier to overlook.
Programming that puts organizations in the same room. AAPI is an enormous category covering dozens of distinct communities that frequently operate in parallel without ever intersecting. Our dinner series, Off The Menu, exists partly to fix that.
Services are delivered through a Community Membership Model. Organizations join the network, and members receive marketing support on an ongoing basis rather than as one-off favors. Most of what we provide costs members nothing. We are onboarding founding members individually so that each group receives real attention rather than a queue position. Apply to join the network.
Our services are available to AAPI-serving nonprofits, cultural groups, artists, educators, and advocates operating anywhere in the United States.
We work with cultural festivals and heritage month organizers, language and heritage schools, immigrant and refugee service agencies, youth mentorship programs, senior centers, faith communities, independent artists, filmmakers and photographers, small business associations, mutual aid networks, student organizations, community health outreach programs, advocacy coalitions, and neighborhood associations.
We give priority to organizations without a marketing budget. That is not a formality. When we allocate capacity, a volunteer-run festival that has never had professional promotion comes before an established nonprofit with a communications director. The point of the organization is to close a resource gap, and prioritizing groups that already have resources would defeat it.
We are national in scope and headquartered in Chicago. Local chapters are in development in Boston, Houston, Oklahoma, and Seattle.
The AAPI Network
33-2987062
501(c)(3) public charity, exempt since December 2024. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
State of Illinois
35 East Wacker Drive, Suite 650, Chicago, IL 60601, United States
Governed by a volunteer board of directors that approves the annual budget, programs, and any related-party transactions. Our IRS determination letter and annual filings are available on request.
The AAPI Network serves and employs people without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or veteran status.