Asian American Justice + Innovation Lab

Asian American Justice + Innovation Lab Incubating justice, practicing liberation, and cultivating collective agility for change.

The Asian American Justice + Innovation Lab is a community racial justice incubator. At its core, AAJIL (pronounced “agile”) offers general racial justice education for all that employs a decolonial framework and intentionally integrates Asian American histories and experiences. Radiating from that core work is the practice of mutual care through community-building, opportunities for collaboration

and innovation, and the long-range potential for participants to impact their spheres of influence with values of justice, liberation, and collective agility.

🌿 Welcoming a second season of AAJIL’s in-person Community Lab → Embodied Emergence with ! 🌿When: Participants will meet...
02/17/2026

🌿 Welcoming a second season of AAJIL’s in-person Community Lab → Embodied Emergence with ! 🌿

When: Participants will meet on Saturdays during the month of March from 11AM - 3PM PST IN-PERSON (LA, CA)

Learn more/sign up at the link in bio or at aajil.org/labs!

🌼 "The wild within and the wild without are kin, the one enlivening the other in a beautiful tango.” -Francis Weller 🌼

Join us for a series of community experiments in stepping into our indigeneity! We will gather in the forest and build (and break apart) stories with each other and with the land through different invitations rooted in embodiment, emergence, connection with the land, grief circles, and group wisdom. Some questions we’ll explore..

🌱 How can we increase our capacities to sit with complexity within ourselves, in others, and in the world at large?
🌱 What do we need collectively in this moment to meet the world as it is, with all its violence and beauty?
🌱 What would it look like to receive the faze of nature? To hear flowers look back at us and whisper to themselves how beautiful we are?
🌱 What, if anything, can numb us?

☀️ Meet the Facilitator ☀️
Angela is a visionary organizer and Kingian nonviolence trainer working towards a world where we have increased capacities to sit with our own and each other’s complexities. Angela stewards community containers where participants can share grief, practice conflict skills, and be co-opted into emergence inspired by the erotic, the intuitive, the divine, the other-than-human. Angela has facilitated workshops for and collaborated with Loving Practice, Asian American Justice Innovation Lab, Visionary Organizing Lab, Friends of the Urban Forest, and the Sacred Roots Collective.

Please email any questions to [email protected]!

🌿 Asian Americans & Nature 🌿Join us on Tuesday, February 3rd at 5PM PST / 8PM EST for our next People’s School for Justi...
01/20/2026

🌿 Asian Americans & Nature 🌿

Join us on Tuesday, February 3rd at 5PM PST / 8PM EST for our next People’s School for Justice session! Register at the link below!

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1980937262678?aff=oddtdtcreator

🌻 This will be a collaborative workshop exploring the ways Asian Americans relate to nature through reflections on migration, labor, and place! 🌻

How have Asian Americans historically been positioned in relationship to nature? What new relationships to our environment can we create? How might we question settler urges to own and commodify nature – what new ways of inhabiting the earth are possible?

🎍 Participants will come together to reflect on the landscapes and everyday environments that shape Asian American lives. Thinking expansively about both “Asian America” and “nature,” and centering lived experience, we will explore how migration, family history, and place influence our relationships with our environment. 🎍

❤️ No prior knowledge needed. We will begin with short grounding/framing, historical context, and case studies around Asian American relationships to nature drawn from my scholarly research, and then move through guided prompts and shared conversation. Looking forward to being in community with you. ❤️

🌱 Meet the Facilitator 🌱

K Yin (they/them/ta) is a writer and scholar. They are currently a PhD student in American Studies at Brown. Broadly, they have interests in and teach on Asian American art, race and ethnic studies, and the environment. Their research explores 19th-century visual archives alongside contemporary Asian American art and performance.

They were raised between Sonoma County and Zhejiang. They love leaf-wrapped foods of all kinds (tamales, zongzi, etc.). You can find their culinary creations at congee_baby on Instagram.

📢 Join us as we launch our newest season of AAJIL's Community Labs! 📢🌊 radix Arts Haus 🌊Explore RAH Movements in interse...
01/08/2026

📢 Join us as we launch our newest season of AAJIL's Community Labs! 📢

🌊 radix Arts Haus 🌊

Explore RAH Movements in intersectional threshold “theatre”; radical expressive arts & spiral culture co-design practice “play” making space for Neuroq***r PLEx!

💫 This is a space for intersectional adult neuroq***r PLEx (People living with Experience) of late-identified *AuDHD + *ABI & *NDE/*STE. Free weekly co-created online "neurocomplex” regenerative social peer gathering for clinically determined, self-determined, and/or questioning self-reflective folks from racialized & marginalized gender q***r minoritized groups. Exploring and experimenting with Neurodivergent DJ+LJ community care practices supporting us in showing up exactly as we already are. Informally communicating, relating, and socializing (*“info-dumping” + *”penguin pebbling” etc.) with inspired creative peers in an arts & culture co-creatrix fellowship. Practicing Disability Justice (DJ) access intimacy and connecting in our natural neurodivergent communication styles, and specialized interests. Uniting in socially supporting one another as peers across and beyond our intersectional identity markers towards sharing in the legacy of DJ arts & “Neuroq***r”culture activism towards Language Justice and international migrant solidarity. A social justice step towards neurodiverse relationship-building, community organizing,and collective actions gesturing us towards synchronizing multi-issue movements supporting collective intersectional liberation. 💫

When: Every Sunday - 11:11AM EST / 8:11AM PST

🥭 Meet the Facilitator 🥭
Your energy animator/convener!
RR (they/she)

Any questions can be sent to [email protected]

Sign-Up at the link in our bio or at aajil.org/labs!

📢 Join us as we launch our newest season of AAJIL's Community Labs! 📢❣️ Radical Tenderness Practice Space ❣️Radical tend...
01/07/2026

📢 Join us as we launch our newest season of AAJIL's Community Labs! 📢

❣️ Radical Tenderness Practice Space ❣️

Radical tenderness is a living, changing term practiced, embodied and shared by artist, transfeminist activist, and educator Dani d’Emilia. Radical tenderness offers reminders and rituals to tune in to our openness for connection to the beautiful, the ugly, the broken within all of us.

🪻 This community lab is an invitation to co-create an exploration of this entity-force together and how it can move and shape our relationships with others and ourselves. To ask ourselves: how can radical be tender? and tenderness be radical? 🪻

🌳 Together we can collectively define what radical tenderness means to us, share stories, metabolize grief, and seek practices towards decolonizing and repoliticizing our ways of being/relating. 🌳

When: Beginning January 25th
2nd and 4th Sundays 1-3PM EST / 10am-12PM PST

☀️ Meet the Facilitator ☀️
Amanda Yuan (she/they)

This space is open to QTBIPOC identifying people. Any questions can be sent to [email protected]

Sign-Up at the link in our bio or at aajil.org/labs!

📢 Join us as we launch our newest season of AAJIL's Community Labs! 📢🌱 Collective Resting 🌱 This community lab is a bi-w...
01/06/2026

📢 Join us as we launch our newest season of AAJIL's Community Labs! 📢

🌱 Collective Resting 🌱

This community lab is a bi-weekly Zoom space to explore rest resistance, learn accessible tools to practice rest on your own, and return to a supportive group that firms, validate, and celebrates rest.

🌼 We will meet on Zoom and first there will be some time to discuss the concept of rest as resistance. Then we will go off on our own and rest in some way, any kind of rest is valid! Afterwards, we will congratulate and validate each others’ rest experiences in a supportive group setting. 🌼

When: Beginning January 19th
1st and 3rd Mondays at 7PM EST / 4PM PST

☀️ Meet the Facilitators ☀️
Cole Huang (he/him) and PhiYen Nguyen (she/her)

This is an Asian-American led space that is open to all identities. Any questions can be sent to [email protected]

Sign-Up at the link in our bio or at aajil.org/labs!

☀️ Documenting Stories: Oral History Production and Best Practices ☀️🌱 Join us on Thursday, 12/18 at 5PM PST / 8PM EST f...
12/15/2025

☀️ Documenting Stories: Oral History Production and Best Practices ☀️

🌱 Join us on Thursday, 12/18 at 5PM PST / 8PM EST for a presentation on oral history production, equipment, software and set ups with a focus on productions with small budgets! 🌱

Register at the link in bio!

🎧 Oral Historian, Artist, Writer, Alan Nakagawa will base this workshop on his thirty-nine years of interdisciplinary art projects using oral history as a base for working with diverse communities.
Nakagawa has worked for educational, non-profit and government institutions with varying budgets and scopes. Keeping a flexible production methodology while listening to the needs of the collaborators, he has built a portfolio of experiences reflecting diverse needs. 🎧

❗️Meet the Instructor❗️Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies, primarily working with sound, often incorporating various media and working with communities and their histories. He has created a series of Invisible Architecture experiences that are mash ups of the recorded acoustics of historical sites, giving new context to historic places through a contemporary lens of sound. Nakagawa has been working on a series of semi-autobiographic sound-architecture/tactile sound experiences, utilizing multi-point audio field recordings of historic interiors; Peace Resonance; Hiroshima/Wendover combines recordings of the interiors of the Hiroshima Atomic Dome (Hiroshima, Japan) and Wendover Hangar (Utah). His first book, “A.I.R.Head: Anatomy of an Artist in Residence” was published in January 2023 by Writ-Large Press. It maps his artistic trajectory that led to his nine Artist-in-residencies in six years.

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🌺 Content Creation for Collective Liberation 🌺‼️ Join us on Tuesday, December 16th at 5:30PM PST for our next People’s S...
12/04/2025

🌺 Content Creation for Collective Liberation 🌺

‼️ Join us on Tuesday, December 16th at 5:30PM PST for our next People’s School for Justice session for a cozy community exploration to help you use your voice online for justice, healing + collective freedom! Register at the link in our bio!‼️

If you’ve ever felt a calling to use your voice for social change, but hesitated in the face of perfectionism, visibility fears, or not knowing where to begin, this space is for you.

🌱 Content Creation for Collective Liberation is a 75-minute Zoom workshop designed for anyone who values community care, collective liberation, and expressive freedom. 🌱

Together, we’ll explore how to create short-form content that centers healing, justice, and authenticity, without sacrificing our mental wellness or creative joy. Through introspection, conversation, and gentle group practices, we’ll unpack our fears, reconnect with our voices, and learn tangible tools for sharing liberatory knowledge on social media. Whether you’re returning to content creation or just starting out, come curious, leave empowered—and maybe even with your next post drafted.

Workshop Session Flow →
✨Intentional check-in + introductions
✨Define collective liberation
✨Re-member the power of using our authentic voice
✨Break down creative fears + internal blocks
✨Journal, share, reframe in community
✨Explore content topics + formats that fit you
✨Close with group shares + reflections

Facilitator info in the comments!

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‼️AAJIL's in-person event Mixed Asian Multitudes & Solidarities is this Friday‼️Join us on Friday, December 5th from 12:...
12/03/2025

‼️AAJIL's in-person event Mixed Asian Multitudes & Solidarities is this Friday‼️

Join us on Friday, December 5th from 12:30PM - 4:30PM at (320 W 37th St) You can register at tinyurl.com/aajilevent

🌱 We have some wonderful programming lined up for the event including a teach-in with Miya Shaffer, a talk-back with , and an interactive music set by 🌱

Also featuring community resources from , zines on a sliding scale, snacks, and more!

🌼 We're so excited to see you there! The space is ADA accessible, masks are highly encouraged for this event. Let's keep each other safe as we uplift, build community, and raise our collective consciousness! 🌼

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🌱 Join us for Mixed Asian Multitudes & Solidarities; an in-person community-building event to raise our collective consc...
11/21/2025

🌱 Join us for Mixed Asian Multitudes & Solidarities; an in-person community-building event to raise our collective consciousness! 🌱

This event is open to all identities as we uplift, learn, and connect. It's an opportunity for folks to strengthen their ties with not just the mixed Asian community but with one another as we work to recognize our shared struggles that will bring us closer to collective liberation.

🎤 You can expect community teach-ins, a short film screening in collaboration with , a music set, and more! Stay tuned for more details and programming info! 🎤

When: Friday, December 5th from 12:30PM - 4:30PM 
Where: (320 W 37th St - ADA accessible)

🌼 Spots are limited; admission is on a sliding scale from $5 - $15! Register at the link in our bio or at tinyurl.com/aajilevent 🌼

We're so excited to see you there! Masks are highly encouraged at this event, they will be available at the door. Please consider taking a COVID test before attending and stay home if you're feeling sick.

And a huge shoutout to the wonderful for such beautiful work on our poster!

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🌱 Join us for Mixed Asian Multitudes & Solidarities; an in-person community-building event to raise our collective consc...
11/21/2025

🌱 Join us for Mixed Asian Multitudes & Solidarities; an in-person community-building event to raise our collective consciousness! 🌱

This event is open to all identities as we uplift, learn, and connect. It's an opportunity for folks to strengthen their ties with not just the mixed Asian community but with one another as we work to recognize our shared struggles that will bring us closer to collective liberation.

🎤 You can expect community teach-ins, a short film screening in collaboration with , a music set, and more! Stay tuned for more details and programming info! 🎤

When: Friday, December 5th from 12:30PM - 4:30PM 
Where: The People's Forum (320 W 37th St - ADA accessible)

🌼 Spots are limited; admission is on a sliding scale from $5 - $15! Register at the link in our bio or at tinyurl.com/aajilevent 🌼

We're so excited to see you there! Masks are highly encouraged at this event, they will be available at the door. Please consider taking a COVID test before attending and stay home if you're feeling sick.

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🌟 Speaking What Is There: Communication and Conflict Skills Ahead of the Holidays 🌟 🌱 Join us on Saturday, November 8th ...
11/04/2025

🌟 Speaking What Is There: Communication and Conflict Skills Ahead of the Holidays 🌟

🌱 Join us on Saturday, November 8th at 2PM PST / 5PM EST! Register for free using this link! https://tinyurl.com/2hk8hx9h 🌱

If you were on a roadtrip with a friend and someone said “look, it’s a tree” how would others respond? Perhaps with affirmations “oh ya”, perhaps with curiosity “do you know what kind of tree that is?” or perhaps with admiration “that is so beautiful.” Why is it that when we share observations of our emotional realities, we are often not met with the same affirmations, curiosity, and admiration? If on this same roadtrip, I were to say “oh look, I am feeling sad that we didn’t have time to stop at my favorite bakery.” Imagine all of the storms that could arise in response. Storms of guilt, shame, blame, perhaps even resentment and annoyance depending on how that roadtrip had been going. But meeting each other’s emotions with affirmation, curiosity, admiration, care, and compassion is possible!

📣 This 1.5-hour workshop will be a space to practice speaking what is there, noticing storms that may be arising in the distance, and meeting each other and our own emotions with curiosity, care, and compassion. The best time to practice these is before we get on that roadtrip, or the holidays with your family. 📣

🌼 About the Facilitator 🌼 Angela is a Visionary Organizing and Kingian Nonviolence facilitator-trainer working towards a world where we have increased capacities to sit with our own and each other’s complexities. Angela stewards community containers where participants can share grief, practice conflict skills, and be co-opted into emergence inspired by the erotic, the intuitive, the divine, and the more-than-human.

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320 West 37th Street
New York, NY
10018

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