Our Guiding Principles

Our mission is to develop youth leaders to build power in Southeast Asian refugee, immigrant, and low-income communities to win affordable housing, fight displacement, and create vibrant neighborhoods of opportunity in and around Los Angeles Chinatown. Our strategies center on youth and community organizing, policy advocacy, and coalition-building.

We envision Chinatown and surrounding neighborhoods as vibrant places where immigrants and refugees have moved beyond survival, to create stable, healthy communities with dignity and collective self-determination – where each generation develops the next wave of movement leaders, and where residents have the resources and power to create just communities, free from fear of displacement.

Our History

Launched in 2002, SEACA was founded on the principle of inclusion, and from the beginning, has been guided by a belief that individuals can improve and build power in their own communities. The organization was started due to a lack of resources targeting the needs of Southeast Asians (SEA). Most API organizations were dominated by the needs and interests of more established API communities (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.) who were typically more affluent. These issues tended to focus largely on representation and glass ceiling (i.e. affirmative action) issues.

Because of their history with the War in Vietnam and the Killing Fields of Cambodia, many Southeast Asians came to the U.S. as refugees, suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, poverty, and poor education (in an effort to return Cambodia to an agrarian society, Pol Pot destroyed all the schools and executed teachers and anyone who appeared to be an intellectual). Yet most organizations that dealt with poverty or education issues were unable or unwilling to represent the needs and concerns of SEA refugees. In order to be able represent the needs of SEA communities with a social justice perspective, it became clear that a new program needed to be created specifically targeting those communities.

SEACA creates spaces for new forms of leadership to emerge and we support the development of members of our community to create new and culturally relevant solutions to deep-rooted social, economic, and racial justice issues impacting the Southeast Asian community. We began as a youth leadership program and over the years have expanded our programs to include youth organizing, creative arts and self-expression, policy advocacy and anti-gentrification work, as well as outreach and initiatives that support community-serving small businesses and vendors in Chinatown.