We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Min Liu. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Min below.

Min , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory of how you established your own practice.

My work with the St. Louis area AAPI youth (mostly high school students) started in 2017, 2018. I was a new board member on a Chinese American non profit and we needed help figuring out social media. I suggested that we bring on high school students, and I got to be the one implementing the idea. While working with them, I realized only having them create a few tik tok campaign messages regarding our cultural festival was a gross under-utilization of their talent and passion. They should be trusted to lead and create programming that didn’t yet exist; they knew of problems in the community that the adults were not fully aware of, let alone understand. So that’s when I decided to start the AAPI youth initiative.

I started with finding people. In this case I started with a high school junior whose mom took the same workout class with me. He instantly understood the idea and brought on his friends, and soon we had a team and began to do some work. Our first real program was an AAPI youth leadership program that lasted about 3 hours. I saw the many students at the event and the excitement on their faces; we knew then that this was something we needed to continue working on.

I would have registered a non profit entity right away. I thought that as long as we did the work, whether or not we exist as a fully registered organization shouldn’t matter. But it does ;-) your org doesn’t exist for real, especially to some funders, till you have paperwork to show.

I also would have registered a .org website instead of starting with a .com and switching over later. I would have started right away with the proper org email accounts, rather than continuing to use my personal gmail account. Again, they seem to have an impact on how people would see us.

I didn’t know back then how much fundraising and grantwriting would matter to this kind of work. Had I known what I know now, I’d have started off with a more strategic thinking about how I spent my personal time; for instance, I’d have liked to start our grantwriting efforts, our partnership building efforts, etc earlier.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Asian American Civic Scholars (AACS) promotes community engagement among Asian American youth through advocacy, leadership, and service. Our goal is to increase well-being and involvement in our local communities, while fostering diverse experiences and perspectives as service-minded, active citizens.
This was our brand-new mission statement (we are finishing a round of strategic planning now). We seek to provide local AAPI youth a platform to advocate for issues they care about and to enact changes they’d like to see.

Mainly led by students, our programming has focused on mental health (in the form of community education), culture and heritage (such as a quite impactful AAPI history initiative, our annual Very Asian Youth Concert, our own AAPI Youth Magazine), advocacy (such as our work in getting out the AAPI vote) to name a few. Our AACS History Team for instance has been archiving and documenting the historic Chinese cemetery in St. Louis that dates back to 1924. Early Chinese American leaders helped purchase lots there to allow Chinese to be buried there when other cemeteries did not accept them. Our team has been fundraising to build a permanent marker to commemorate that piece of local Asian American history.

Problems we believe are addressed by our work: St. Louis area AAPI communities tend to mostly function in silo and there lacked a pan-asian platform for AAPI youth to work together. AAPI youth in the midwest have uniquely different needs and challenges when compared to those in the coastal areas–and they need to be better served/understood. Most of our youth do not feel motivated to return to the Midwest after they leave for college, and we think strengthening their sense of belonging, trusting them with tools to serve and improve their communities, while they are in k-12 is key.

We’ve grown in our capacity; after 8 years of programming (though only year 2 if you ask about our state registration ;-(, we’ve grown from a 0 budget to a modest yet meaningful budget; we’ve developed A LOT of meaningful, impactful, partnerships which we are so proud of.

And we continue to have some success with our social media!!

Each year we’ve had at least 1 member of our executive team who’s gone on to college with an intention to do advocacy work, to serve their new AAPI community, or even to take courses in Asian American studies. We think ultimately that’s what matters–our service-minded, active youth become service-minded, active citizens.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

(note: we are not for profit so maybe I chose the wrong category at the start of the survey!)
In our case, recruiting students with great potential to lead, working with them to set their own agenda for their work with AACS, and supporting their journey–helps create strong programming, which helps get our name out there.

Another key issue we don’t talk about enough is to simply not give up. Non profit work is lonely and sometimes you do wonder, does any of what I do even matter? Who’d notice if I stopped? Who would care if we hosted 2 listening circles with AAPI parents on youth mental health, rather than 6 which we worked hard to do last year? Well, student leaders, even the best ones, come and go; they leave the org and the area when they finish high school. So, I know I need to keep going since there is another cohort of 15 year olds who have their list of things they’d like to do as a leader. So, by not giving up, I keep the work going, which I think the community also needs to know; that we are here to stay if they ever want to partner with us, or invest in our work. We are getting our name out there so more institutions are noticing our work and supporting us.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

The story of how we/I decided to do programming on youth mental health is important to tell. I know of 4 AAPI high school students who passed away due to unmet mental health needs in St. Louis within the last 20 years, give or take. Different people told me about each tragedy in different conversations. The one that stood out to me was the student who ended his life in the summer before his freshmen year at the most prestigious university. My student leaders would tell me back then, that if it could take the life of someone with his accomplishments, it could happen to other young people unless we stop the silence and talk about this ugly, inconvenient truth in our community.
We started to try different ideas. We figured doing something is better than not doing anything at all. It took a few years till we came to a functioning model of what works for our organization and our community needs. But I am so glad the students had faith in our organization and pushed for us to become part of the solution.
We did about 2 years of mental health advocacy and education work while relying on everyone to donate their time, space, and resources. Then we started to apply for funding, which was definitely nerve wrecking. We had our first great success in 2021 and that brought so much momentum to our team. Having a funder tell us, “we see your vision and would like to help you bring that to reality”, the value of that goes beyond the dollar amount of that grant, for us as a grassroots organization. Hopefully that excitement will always stay with us and fuel our work.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.asianamericancivicscholars.org; https://aapimentalhealthstl.org/
• Instagram: civicasian
• Facebook: Asian American Civic Scholars
• Youtube: @aacs7251