Uniting and empowering our communities by addressing the social injustices, economic inequalities and political under-representation that Southeast Asians face! In 2000, Professor Khatharya Um hosted a Southeast Asian Conference at UC Berkeley to commemorate the 25th year of the Southeast Asian diaspora after the war in Southeast Asia (more familiarly known as the Viet Nam War). She asked a few So
utheast Asian UC Berkeley students in her class and some she knew to help get involved with the conference. Using data information collected the conference Professor Um along with the UC Berkeley students developed the booklet that SASC has called A Dream Denied about Southeast Asians and their struggle to gain access to higher education. After the conference, the youth summit organizers, consisting of members from the Laotian, Hmong, Cambodian, and Vietnamese student groups felt connected and saw a need for a space/coalition to address issues across the community. They recognized that there were distinct groups that already existed to promote cultural awareness and knew that that was not one of their primary goals. They were also aware that they wanted the group to be more than just a student organization, but a coalition between the Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Laotian students coming together on common issues to strengthen the community as a whole, hence the name Southeast Asian Student Coalition. The name was created by the students as they sat at Sproul Fountain. Their goals at the time included greater promotion of higher education, community building between the different groups, outreaching to the larger community. At the time they believed that there was a niche that needed to be filled – an organization that would work with the different cultural groups as well as the recruitment and retention center to address the SEA community in particular. Their goal was to both build coalition as well as empowerment, and to step beyond the needs at Berkeley to incorporate the communities we came from. They went around the East Bay community asking and understanding what it is exactly that they can do. After all of that, in 2002 SASC Summer Institute was born. They wanted something where they can effectively outreach, teach, and learn to/from young people. Since then SASC has grown into a larger community and has expanded its reaches into the community. SASC’s current programs include SEA Grad, SEAMentorship, SEA Prison Outreach Project, and Anthology. In 2005, a group of SASC folks had multiple meetings about the rebuilding of SASC, due to issues of sustainability and finding leaders in the community. From these meetings SASCommunity, a non-hierarchical committee, was created. SASComm strives to create a community of committees hoping to explore SASC’s mission statement in different and multiple dimensions. The Round-Table structure for SASCommunity is set up to create a cohesive unit and non-hierarchical organizing system.
