Pan-Asian Organizing for Empowerment? Unpacking Nonprofit Discourses across Organizational Status Positions

Abstract

Scant attention to the challenges and possibilities of pan-Asian organizing motivates this research. Grounded in the lens of intersecting standpoints, the author investigated in this study what discourses from members of three status groups (i.e., staff, volunteering members, and clients) construct a pan-Asian nonprofit organization (NPO). The pan-Asian agency, under a pseudonym of Center of Peace for Asians, is founded in 2006 to meet the needs of underserved Asians and Asian immigrant women (and men) in a U.S. Southwestern city. The author approached the pan-Asian agency as an identity-based NPO. Relying on the perspective of intersecting standpoints, the analysis interrogated what status-based interview discourses revealed about pan-Asian nonprofit work and ideological implications of such discursive constructions for reconsidering pan-Asian organizing. The results indicate that members of the three status groups diverged in their constructions of the NPO and organizational status positions emerged as an important identity position that intersected ethnicity, class, etc. A dominant ideology—consistent with the nonprofit-industrial complex—undergirding the competing discourses governed the constructions of the pan-Asian nonprofit's productivity (i.e., “The best way to serve the underserved Asians is to professionalize them through individual crisis counseling”). Extended understandings about intersecting standpoints and implications of pan-Asian organizing are discussed.