SAALT is currently in a transformational period of chrysalis. Read our full chrysalis statement.
PURPOSE
South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) was a national movement strategy and advocacy organization committed to racial justice through structural change, which means we focused on transforming institutions while leveraging incremental change as a means to shift conditions and power.
MISSION
We did this through federal policy and advocacy, local and national partnerships, coalition building (i.e. NCSO) and strategic communications. We convened dedicated spaces for South Asian organizations across the country to engage in political education leading to strategies and narratives to realize our vision.
vision
SAALT’s vision was to help build a South Asian American community with shared values that uplifted all people of color, and across lines of race, caste, gender, sexuality, and religion to abolish systems of oppression and achieve collective liberation.
South Asians will come together around the belief that none of us is free until all of us are free, understanding that we can only reach this collective liberation by centering and prioritizing the demands of those most marginalized. South Asians in the U.S. will work in unity to combat policies, rhetoric, and action stemming from systemic racism, Islamophobia, and white supremacy; acknowledging the transnational connections to this violence and its impact on the U.S. Diaspora.
Widespread political education will bring people with varying experiences and backgrounds of political engagement together to continuously learn from each other, heal with each other, and reflect on each other’s shared histories to better organize for collective liberation. There will be enduring infrastructure to mobilize quickly and effectively when threats or needs emerge that impact any one of us, prioritizing those most marginalized.
background
Nearly 5.4 million South Asians live in the United States, a 40 percent increase in population size from the Census count in 2010. Our growing and diverse communities trace their roots to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Kashmir, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and the diaspora, including but not limited to Trinidad/Tobago, Guyana, Fiji, Tanzania, and Kenya. South Asian Americans Leading Together was originally conceived of as a South Asian leadership organization, to increase representation of our communities, in all their diversity.
In SAALT’s first year, 20 years ago, 9/11 and the subsequent Islamophobic targeting of our communities through state and interpersonal violence shook South Asians across the U.S. In the midst of that crisis, SAALT rose both to meet the needs of the moment and to help build community infrastructure for South Asians so that the next time a crisis struck, we would have a network in place to come together and organize, act, and advocate for ourselves and our rights.
Over twenty years later, the world looks different, yet so many of the underlying, structural injustices remain. The COVID-19 pandemic is raging, devastating people’s lives across the U.S., and disproportionately impacting Black and brown working-class communities. Climate change is no longer a distant theory, but a lived reality that transcends borders, which themselves are already witnessing unprecedented militarization, surveillance, and occupation. We recognize the need to resist institutionalized power that continues to threaten the livelihoods and rights of people across the world, including Islamophobia and Hindu nationalism, xenophobic political rhetoric, and white supremacist hate violence, which all continue to endanger the lives of South Asians both in the U.S. and globally.
VALUES
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold Dalit Bahujan & Adivasi truths, legacies & assertions as central to being anti caste and annihilating caste
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold queer justice and the dignity of trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming lives
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold Black and Indigenous liberation, racial justice, and decolonization
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold gender justice and ending gender-based violence across South Asian communities, while centering the experiences of DBA women, queer, trans, and nonbinary people
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold economic justice and the need to democratize wealth and power, informed by an analysis of class and anti-capitalism
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold environmental justice and just transition – the transition from an extractive economy to regenerative economy – as a framework to build and sustain relationships and address systems change
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold disability justice and equitable access to care, both interpersonally and systemically
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold abolition of the prison industrial complex, in both the U.S. and across South Asia
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold historical and contemporary DBA self assertions from South Asia (i.e. knowledge and cultural production) as foundational to SAALT’s analysis of caste, faith, class and community
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold immigrant justice and that South Asianess exists in multiplicities of our immigration and diasporic identities, through self-reflection and honest storytelling
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold the practice of transformative justice, relational growth, love, accountability and care for ourselves and our communities, through consistent practices of giving and receiving feedback and conflict transformation
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold healing and wellness as connected to deep and sustained social change, and therefore integrated into how we work together
We as SAALT unapologetically value and uphold human rights and the social equality of all people, and refuse to uphold religious and cultural practices which reinforce inequality
View our most recent 990 and learn more about how we sustain our work.