''Where’s the class analysis here?''

• Not enough volunteers to outreach to marginalized South Asian community members
• Needs assessment and mapping of the community
• Creating gender and class balance in services, outreach and programming
• Community carries with them the histories of partition, caste, class, religious and regional division from countries of origin
• Managing growth and coordination of an organization that is largely volunteer
• Model-minority identity
• Lack of local and national infrastructure to coordinate, support efforts and share resources
• Disjuncture and difference in organizing South Asian community in urban versus semi-suburban or more spread out areas that do not have an activate South Asian base
• Homophobia, classism, sexism, racism, regionalism and religious bias within organizations providing services, advocacy and organizing
• Lost messaging when approaching community with a political analysis and within the challenging community

Manavi 1985

• Clients have been primarily Indian, middle class women
• Build more relationship with marginalized women
• Not enough volunteers
• Doing needs assessment on communities not reached yet
• Difficult talking about sexuality, women on women violence
• Internally done anti-homophobia training

Trikone 1986

• The focus has been to provide safe space
• Commitment of having a 50/50 split for women and men identified folks.
• Mostly middle class
• South Bay and San Francisco split

 South Asian Network 1990

• Lack of history from the country of origin
• Challenges in creating connections with other social issues
• Buy in to model-minority
• History of South Asian partition
• Locally-based, but no national infrastructure
• Didn’t know what a non-profit status was, funding/money was four letter word

Foil 1992

• List lost its focus, it doubled – problem of success
• People didn’t really know each other. 
• Tried to break people on list into regional zones and suggested people meet up
• Reaction negative that FOIL was trying to organize, trying to be concrete, structured organization