Khmer Girls In Action began in 1997, as a Cambodian young women’s organizing project of Asians & Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health (APIRH). Recognizing the need to determine the direction of their own community, members of the project decided to transition from APIRH in 2001 and move towards building a youth-led organization that is sustainable in the Long Beach Southeast Asian community. As a newly formed organization as of 2002, KGA seeks to have members take ownership of the project and build an institution that is grounded in the community. KGA grew from a pilot project comprised of 14 girls, to a girl-led organizing agency that engages members to develop organizing strategies that are sensitive to the cultural and political conditions of Southeast Asian communities. KGA core values include:

Self Determination for Southeast Asian immigrant and refugee communities. We believe that members of a community are the ones that best know the conditions of their community and are the ones to determine the most effective means for building and strengthening their community; Grassroots community organizing to achieve social change. We believe in building local collective power to advocate for institutional change; Gender and culture specific approaches to youth organizing.

We recognize that Southeast Asian women and girls face multiple levels of oppression and development of organizing campaigns must address their specific experiences and needs;

Full participation of young women at all levels of the organization. We encourage and nurture the perspectives and participation of young women in all levels of decision-making and board membership. We believe in the leadership of both Southeast Asian women and girls to create social change in and outside of their community; and

Community partnership and engagement: We acknowledge the importance and value of community strength, knowledge, and expertise and believe that partnerships are vital to creating change. We seek partnerships and community collaborations with a cross-section of groups that work on diverse range of social justice issues.

KGA believes that the most effective way to create sustainable, on-going change in a community is to support and foster the self-determination of its members. KGA actively pursues our mission through 3 core strategies: leadership development, community organizing, and cultural production. All of KGA’s programming components foster and encourage analysis of gender, class, race, sexuality, and culture. Our intensive Khmer Justice Leadership Trainings includes increasing Cambodian young women’s knowledge on a range of issues, including promoting healthy self image, understanding gender roles, gay/lesbian/bi/transgender issues, sexual harassment and violence against women, and analyzing power and privilege. Our cultural expression and production activities use the power of history, language, tradition, identity, and culture to document community history and experiences, engage community members, and inspire change.

Our current cultural programming involving digital storytelling filmmaking, documents diverse racial justice and reproductive rights issues, such as racial profiling, war and the impact on women and children, welfare reform, and deportation through a youth and gender lens.

Our organizing work builds from all of our program components to provide opportunities for the community to use their collective power and create institutional change. KGA believes that building the political analysis of our members to understand the complexities of national policies that attack immigrants, people of color, poor families, women, and young people contribute to building knowledge and power of the community to fight and advocate for justice within the context of improving their lives and the communities they live. The focus is not just on individual behavior change, but systems change and approaching this change in a comprehensive manner through our organizing model that incorporates the strength of youth, gender, culture, and community. We identify our role as building a base of young women of color activists to lead in organizing efforts to ring groups together to create collective power, promote just policies that are accountable to immigrant and refugee communities, and challenge the ideology that Asian women cannot be leaders in this struggle.

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