If you’ve been on Facebook in the last couple of months, then you might have been inundated with requests to vote in Chase’s Community Giving Facebook Campaign. With financial resources drying up for many organizations, this campaign has been a rare opportunity for non-profit orgs to come by cold, hard cash by simply leveraging their social media muscles. Out of more than a half million eligible organizations, the Top 100 vote getters in Round 1 have moved on to the final round of voting, which is happening now. Top 100 orgs are already the recepients of a $25,000 grant, but the top organization gets $1 million.
Six Los Angeles area organizations are in the running for the $1M: [links go to Facebook pages]
In the spirit of full disclosure, I have been supporting the Center for the Pacific Asian Family (CPAF) in this campaign, since I feel that their “big idea” has the greatest potential for immediate impact on those who are living in Los Angeles, right now. CPAF was founded to help address domestic violence and sexual assault in the Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Up to 60% of Asian and Pacific American women experience domestic or sexual abuse in their lifetime, and are the least likely to report the abuse. Since the economic downturn in 2008, domestic violence has been on the rise. With cutbacks in state funding, non-profits like CPAF are forced to turn away more callers trying to flee a violent home.
CPAF proposes to fund a multilingual call center (beyond Asian languages) to support emergency shelters and rape crisis centers to stretch their resources to serve more survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. Currently, each of the 20 domestic violence shelters and 6 rape crisis centers in Los Angeles County run their own 24 hour hotlines. One joint hotline would benefit everyone, but the resources to plan for and develop a sustainable joint hotline do not exist. If CPAF receives the Chase dollars, it will invest in developing the technological and programmatic infrastructure to handle crisis calls for all partnering agencies, in over 30 languages, at CPAF’s Multi-Lingual Call Center. CPAF will also extend the hotline services to include ONLINE CHAT to make services more accessible to survivors. CPAF will also establish VIDEO CONFERENCING capacity at partnering agencies, which will allow bilingual staff based in CPAF’s Call Center to provide multi-lingual services throughout Los Angeles County. Materials, including multi-media productions in various languages, will be collected and developed to be shared with partnering agencies and larger community through an ONLINE LIBRARY.
All that said, the Asian American community has been banding together in this campaign to get folks online and to VoteCPAF.org! This is significant in terms of community organizing because it is probably the largest and most effective grassroots online effort done by the Asian American community– one which has gotten big names from different fields together behind one cause. A series of PSAs have been released on YouTube, and I share with LA Metbloggers one of my favorites, Danny Cho as Kim Jong Il folllowing up on his “eHarmony” video and tells us how much he loves women– asking us not to “violence women domestically or internationally.” It’s a funny video with a a serious message.
There are only 3 days left to vote in this campaign, so definitely check out the various worthy candidates for $1 million.
Related posts:
- Pan-Asian Vadges
- Reaching the Chinese-American & Taiwanese-American community to vote NO on Prop 8 in California
- May is API Heritage Month: “Asian American Arts Stimulus Package” giveaway
- 7th Day Of Giving: East LA Community Arts and Mural Program
- Lodestone Theatre Ensemble to Close its Final Production this weekend
Joz... sounds like "Jaws"
jozjozjoz is an asian american gal who lives and blogs underneath the hollywood sign and who doesn’t clean her fishtank unless the fish starts to do the backstroke. she is also able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but cannot stop from bumping into door handles, cabinet doors, and anything else that protrudes or has a sharp edge. she does not run with scissors for this same reason. she can pet the fur off a dog but don’t ask her to go anywhere near a horse. or a moth. or a roach. her dealings with L.A.’s finest (aka the parking violations department) are legend, as are her giant sneezes.
Other than the two too many joz’s, jozjozjoz is a perfectly normal, relatively sane individual who defies the odds, reaches for the stars, and carries moonbeams home in a jar. She’d rather be a fish… but not in her own dirty fishtank.
aside from her personal blog at 
