Our Mission
The Chinese Progressive Association is a grassroots membership-based organization that empowers the Chinese community in the San Francisco Bay Area and promotes justice and equality for all people. CPA’s campaigns and programs improve the living and working conditions of low-income immigrants and give ordinary community members a stronger voice in the decision-making processes that affect them. CPA supports other disenfranchised communities fighting for human rights and self-determination. CPA works for world peace and sustainability and promotes U.S. China people’s friendship.
Our History
1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s
New Challenges, New Opportunities – The Nineties
The demographic, political, and economic trends of the 1990s presented new challenges and opportunities for CPA. As the continued immigration of Asians and Latinos remade our city, state, and nation, conservative forces launched new attacks on immigrants and communities of color. Corporate-led and government encouraged globalization also emerged as a monumental threat to the well being of poor communities and the natural environment.
CPA mobilized strong grassroots resistance to the new onslaught of reactionary social policies in the mid 1990s: California Proposition 187 (1994), California Proposition 209 (1996), and the Federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996) a.k.a. “welfare reform.” We launched petition and letter writing campaigns, held community forums, conducted Get Out the Vote work, and participated in large, diverse actions for immigrant and poor peoples’ rights at local venues and at the state capital. Although most of these policies were eventually adopted, CPA educated thousands of community members, cultivated new grassroots leaders, and strengthened our alliances with other immigrant-based progressive groups.
Institutionalizing Resistance
Although by the nineties, CPA had been working on empowerment campaigns and organizing for twenty years, the nineties saw the organization’s maturation as CPA began to formally institutionalize its programming. Throughout its struggles, immigrant women often played several leadings roles. In 1995, CPA organized the Women’s Group as a vehicle for immigrant women’s leadership and peer support. Meeting monthly, the Women’s Group provides consistent support and leadership to CPA’s various campaigns and activities. The group has also conducted joint leadership trainings and campaigns with Mujeres Unidas y Activas and has built alliances with other immigrant women’s groups.
Throughout the 1990s, immigrant youth have also been a key part of CPA’s development and evolution. Through a series of youth-focused initiatives in the early and mid nineties, CPA created a unique model of youth development and organizing tailored to the needs of low-income immigrant Chinese youth. In 1996, CPA launched Chinese Power against Tobacco to engage young people in health education and the struggle for healthy communities. By the late nineties, CPA had initiated Common Roots, a cross cultural youth education and empowerment program organized with People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Justice (PODER), a grassroots Latino-based organization in the Mission District. Common Roots students have become involved in both CPA and PODER campaigns.
And while many celebrated the economic boom of the late nineties, living conditions deteriorated, and some communities’ very survival was threatened. This gave impetus to CPA’s Housing Justice Campaign in 1997. CPA organized immigrant tenants to hold landlords and city agencies accountable for unsafe and unsanitary conditions and to win major improvements to housing code enforcement in the community. Besides holding a number of Healthy Homes educational meetings, we also formed the Chinatown SRO (Single Room Occupancy) Collaborative with the Chinatown Community Development Center and have helped build a strong network with tenants’ rights groups in the Mission, Tenderloin, and South of Market Districts.