By Sara L.M. Davis
In November 2006, Chinese AIDS activist Li Dan sent me an email in New York. I had met this young Chinese PhD student turned AIDS activist once or twice, most recently at a dinner honoring him as a recipient of the Reebok Human Rights Award.
“We’re thinking of starting an AIDS law center in Beijing,” he wrote in his message. “Do you know anyone who might be interested?”
I did – in fact, I had just come home from having coffee with Jonathan Cohen of the Open Society Institute, who had mentioned an interest in funding an AIDS law project in China. That project launched both Li Dan’s Korekata AIDS Law Center and Asia Catalyst.
Five years after that email, Asia Catalyst has worked with many more grassroots groups around East and Southeast Asia – some of which failed when founders relapsed or were hospitalized, some of which have created exciting and innovative projects, and all of which have created a booming and dynamic new civil society sector in Asia.
The world knows that China’s economy is growing rapidly, but not everyone has noticed the growth of nonprofits at the same time. In China, Burma, Vietnam and Indonesia, grassroots groups are springing up to address urgent health issues, such as HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, and drug dependence. To transition from a gleam in the founder’s eye to a sustainable nonprofit, though, this first generation of pioneers needs basic skills: strategic planning, budgeting, and staff and volunteer management.
Since our launch in 2007, we have:
- Provided intensive one-on-one coaching in management and advocacy skills to ten nonprofits or nonprofit networks in China and Indonesia
- Held workshops for forty-five nonprofits in China (including Tibet Autonomous Region), Korea and Myanmar.
- Published resources and tools in Chinese, Thai and English, including the Nonprofit Survival Guide
While many groups of people living with HIV/AIDS and others start out providing basic services to their community, once they encounter discrimination, corruption and barriers to treatment access, they often become rights activists also. There is a growing demand for training in documentation and advocacy skills. As a result, we have also:
- Worked with Thai AIDS Treatment Action group and Korekata AIDS Law Center to create a trilingual (Chinese, Thai and English) human rights training series Know It, Prove It, Change It: A Rights Curriculum for Grassroots Groups
- Published groundbreaking reports on China’s blood disaster and on barriers to treatment for children living with HIV/AIDS, while training three Chinese groups to conduct research and publish their own reports
- Helped twenty Chinese activists to make their voices heard at international conferences
- Showcased Chinese LGBT films at our “Comrades” film festival in New York
- And when they came under pressure, we have worked with universities and nonprofits to place sixteen AIDS activists in emergency “visiting scholar” positions in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the United States.
This year, Asia Catalyst celebrates five years of partnering with grassroots groups in East and Southeast Asia. As they have grown, we are growing with them.
We’re developing new projects that enable us to provide support and coaching to an even greater number of NGOs in East and Southeast Asia who pledge to “pay it forward” by training smaller NGOs. Our NGO Leadership Cohort will train ten Chinese health rights groups in management skills, and will certify some to lead their own Cohorts in the future. We’ll also publish the third volume of our human rights curriculum, and pilot our work in a new country.
We never had seed money to start Asia Catalyst. It started on a laptop in my apartment, and for years, while I taught Chinese language to middle school kids to pay the rent, Asia Catalyst volunteers called a corner café our “conference room”. We were able to build Asia Catalyst with the goodwill and donated time of friends, students and board members, and by drawing on the many free resources around New York City. Today, we face the next challenge; building the infrastructure to make our program work sustainable. There aren’t grants for that, and we have to rely on individual donors. We hope you’ll consider a donation. Our board of directors, many of whom work for nonprofits themselves, has generously offered to match all gifts in 2012 up to $7,500.
Because, like our partners in Asia, we started as an underfunded grassroots nonprofit, we have experienced some of the challenges they face. Though we ride through many of the same ups and downs they do, we continue to be encouraged by the courage and creativity they show, the impact they have had, and the potential of our partners to create real and lasting change.
The blog you are reading talks about a diverse group of people: doctors, former drug users, national networks, and small rural support groups. Together they make up a new generation of leaders. We hope they will inspire you as much as they inspire us, and that you’ll join us in celebrating our fifth year of inciting nonprofit stability in Asia.
