Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) is an environmental justice organization with deep roots in California’s Asian immigrant and refugee communities. Since 1993, we’ve built a membership base of Laotian refugees in Richmond and Chinese immigrants in Oakland. Together, we’ve fought and won campaigns to make our communities healthier, just places where people can thrive.
We know that pollution from dirty oil and gas doesn’t just impact our neighborhoods, it threatens *every* neighborhood by destabilizing our climate and intensifying extreme weather like droughts, floods, hurricanes, and typhoons. It exacerbates the injustices that already exist because the communities with the fewest material resources to prepare for and recover from these disasters are the first and worst hit.
That’s why we’re building community-owned renewable energy resources to power our neighborhoods, protecting affordable housing so that our historic cultural communities can stay together, creating a local economy of cooperatives owned and governed by community members, and taking back control of our democracy.