CAA is working to ensure that internet access is treated as a public necessity—no different from water, power, or transit—so that all communities can thrive in the digital age. In 2024, we released San Francisco’s Digital Deserts: How San Francisco Chinatown and Other Neighborhoods Are Left Behind in the Digital Divide, the first report to reveal how the city’s digital divide leaves low-income Chinese families and neighborhood businesses behind. We found that nearly half of Chinatown households (44%) lack broadband internet and families living in single room occupancy dwellings face especially unreliable connections. Without the internet, many Chinatown businesses cannot process cashless payments, which undermines the entire neighborhood economy.

By making these inequities visible, CAA galvanized policymakers and partners to act. Our advocacy, alongside community allies, led the California Public Utilities Commission to award  $32 million in broadband infrastructure grants to Bay Area cities—$10 million of which will go to underserved neighborhoods including Chinatown, the Tenderloin, and Bayview-Hunters Point. 

While the 2024 national election’s results devastated us, they confirmed: we will fight for one another as we always have. In San Francisco, CAA galvanized our community with the 2024 CAA Voter Guide that helped voters make informed decisions on city and state-wide measures. In the run-up to the city election, we hosted candidate forums for individuals running for positions on the San Francisco Board of Education, as well as the San Francisco Supervisor role for District 3. 

Our community prevailed on all the ballot measure positions we took — like passing funds for schools, housing, and hospitals, protecting reproductive rights, and reducing taxes for small businesses that make our neighborhoods special. These local victories keep us steadfast in our fight for a just, collective, multi-racial democratic future.

As China faced an economic downturn, a record number of Chinese migrants sought safety and opportunity by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Like many others, more than 24,000 Chinese migrants took the treacherous 60-mile journey through the Darien Gap confronting death and disease before continuing north. With few organizations able to provide Chinese migrants with in-language assistance, the Haitian Bridge Alliance called on CAA to support these new arrivals. Over the past year, our staff made several trips to the San Diego border, providing direct support to Chinese asylum seekers in their transition. 

Listening to their stories reminded us that the movement of people has always been shaped by war, economic crises, and increasingly, climate change. Yet today, migration itself is being weaponized. The right-wing leaders and media attempted to spread false claims that China is “sending military-aged men” across the border. These baseless attacks are designed to incite fear and division in an election year. In response, CAA’s Chinese Digital Engagement team acted swiftly to debunk disinformation in real time on WeChat and other Chinese-language platforms, ensuring that the truth shaped the narrative.

With our partners in San Francisco’s Language Access Network (LAN), CAA passed critical amendments to the Language Access Ordinance, strengthening the city’s commitment to providing vital information and services in multiple languages. These amendments lowered the City’s official language threshold from 10,000 to 6,000, making Vietnamese, along with Chinese, Spanish, and Tagalog, an official certified language for the first time! Together, we enshrined the universal right to be served in the language you are most comfortable with, and codified access to telephonic interpretation and written translation.

At CAA, our mission centers on building community through shared culture and collective history. Guided by a deep commitment to preserving the unique character of San Francisco’s Chinatown, we are proud to be one of six founding organizations at the helm of Chinatown Media and Arts Collaborative (CMAC).

One of CMAC’s signature initiatives, Edge on the Square, stands as a groundbreaking cultural space that resists the displacement of local creatives by providing material and cultural resources to Chinatown’s artists and audiences. In 2024, Edge on the Square supported 150+ BIPOC artists and activists, whose visionary work drew over 25,000 visitors to the space and neighboring small businesses.