2025 National AAPI Leadership Summit | July 17, 2025
Join APIAVote and AAPI community leaders from across the country on July 17th for the 2025 National AAPI Leadership Summit — a full-day public event dedicated to lifting up the voices, stories, and strategies of our movement.
This year’s summit will spotlight the successes and lessons learned from our partners’ work during the 2024 election cycle, offering critical insights into AAPI voting trends, organizing strategies, and civic engagement across diverse communities. Through dynamic plenaries, grassroots storytelling, and real-time lessons from the field, attendees will walk away equipped to strengthen their local impact and fuel long-term political power.
Agenda highlights include:
- Insights into AAPI voter behavior in 2024, featuring leading data experts
- Field stories from organizers engaging independent and hard-to-reach AAPI voters
- Workshops on youth engagement, local mobilization, and the impact of executive actions
- Hands-on strategy building for expanding voter outreach and leadership pipelines
The Summit concludes with an evening networking social setting the stage for the following day’s Partner Convening, where APIAVote’s network will dive deeper into collaborative strategy, knowledge-sharing, and campaign planning for the 2026 midterms and beyond.
Together, we’re building momentum, shaping narrative, and activating the next generation of AAPI leaders.
AAPI National Leadership Summit Speakers
AAPI National Leadership Summit Agenda
Thursday, July 17, 2025
As the AAPI electorate grows in size and influence, understanding its voting patterns, motivations, and barriers has never been more critical. This opening plenary will explore key trends in turnout, party preference, issue salience, and overall demographics. The role of misinformation campaigns and our communities’ varying levels of trust in our political systems will also be explored. This session brings together leading experts from the worlds of pollsters, analysts, and campaign professionals to unpack the AAPI vote in 2024 and 2022. They draw from their lived campaign experiences as well as from data disaggregated by ethnicity, age, and nativity. This sets the stage for the Leadership Summit with clarity: a call for the year-round, strategic, and culturally informed organizing that is essential to unlocking the full power of the AAPI vote.
Panelists
- Moderator: Carrie Pugh, President & CEO, 8821 Strategies
- Haris Aqeel, Senior Advisor, Catalist
- Seiji Carpenter, Vice President, David Binder Research
- Mini Timmaraju, President & CEO, Reproductive Freedom for All
This plenary session will explore the motivations, concerns, and cultural nuances of independent AAPI voters—a growing yet often overlooked demographic in U.S. elections. Through firsthand stories, data insights, and grassroots perspectives, panelists will discuss effective strategies for engaging these voters, building trust beyond partisan lines, and ensuring their voices shape political outcomes.
Moderator: Sophia Cai, Politico
Panelists:
- Ben Chou, Program Officer for Democracy, Rights, and Governance, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation
- Mohan Seshadri, Executive Director, Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance and the Asian American Community Fund of Pennsylvania
- Ricky Ly, ACT Florida
- Duy Nguyen
- Victoria Huynh, AAPI Hub
Attacks on immigrants, challenges to higher education institutions, economic harm, and more. Recent Executive Orders have proven harmful to AAPIs across the country.
This panel discussion will feature local leaders from impacted communities across the country. We’ll hear how their people are experiencing these EO’s as well as how they’re banding together to protect one another.
Panelists
- Moderator: Joie Chen, Special Contributor, “Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien”
- Mary Niedermeyer, Executive Director, CAPI USA
- Amber Reed, Executive Director, Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders New Jersey
- Cevadne Lee, Director of Health and Policy, Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance, Inc.
- Grace Pai, Executive Director, Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago
What is the current state of youth political participation in the US? What do effective strategies and pipelines look like when designed for youth spaces? What will it take to develop the next generation of AAPI youth leaders?
This session delves into all that and more with a panel of changemakers who uplift the voices of young AAPIs and help ensure our future has another generation of strong leaders.
Panelists:
Moderator: Nicholas Wu, POLITICO
Kareena Salvi, Asian Pacific Islander American Vote (APIAVote)
Akeela Kongdara, Asian Texans for Justice (ATJ)
Syeda Bano, Arizona Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander for Equity (AZ AANHPI for Equity)
Purvi Patel, North Carolina Asian Americans Together (NCAAT)
Friday, july 18, 2025
Participants will be placed in cohorts of 8 – 10 people and will be returning to these cohorts for breakout discussions throughout the day. In this morning time block, participants will have a chance to meet their cohorts.
Across the country, Independent and Non-Party Affiliated Voters are growing in number and influence. This session will cover issues that compel independent AAPI voters to engage in the political process, and challenge us to reframe issues from a perspective of shared values rather than opposing parties.
Moderator: Cheryl Hori
Panelists:
- Iman Awad, National Director of Policy & Advocacy, Emgage National
- Laiba Nisar, Student Organizer & former APIAVote Intern, University of Maryland
- Hannah Locop, FL AAPIs for Progress
This session seeks to put into context how this administration is harming our communities through its executive orders and other actions. We will explore the impact of the orders and actions and hear how national organizations are responding to them. strategize on how best to connect national groups with community groups who are on the frontlines in the effort to address these continuing attacks on our community.
After hearing voices from national organizations on how they are responding to these administrative actions that are harmful to our communities, we will breakout into smaller group discussions to explore options and solutions that may help protect our communities.
Panelists
- Judith Teruya, Executive Director, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus
- Gisela Perez Kusakawa, Executive Director, Asian American Scholar Forum
- Hannah Liu, Manager, Immigration Advocacy, Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC
- Moderator: Bob Sakaniwa, Director of Policy and Advocacy, APIAVote
The information landscape and political climate at-large have shifted dramatically since this time last summer. We will provide a lay of the land, discuss APIAVote’s future plans in combating mis/disinformation encompasses, and focus on one of the most burning questions organizers face: how do we deal with mis/disinformation when talking to voters?
Speakers
- Kyle Van Fleet, Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote (APIAVote)
- Jake Engle, Upswing Research
Provide “non-fundraising” staff with insight into resource development (fundraising) and how all roles in an organization contribute to sustaining and building revenue. Participants will have time to process the conversation and start developing actionable next steps to contribute to their organization and program sustainability.