2027 Pre-Conference Sessions

Morning Sessions

• 1 – Asian Allyship Training for Higher Education
• 2 – BCNA My Future: From Past Treads to Possible Futures
• 3 – From CCW to Pasifika Cultural Wealth: Reimagining Critical Frameworks Through Indigenous Pasifika Epistemologies
• 4 – LEAP Advance: Continuing to Move Forward
• 5 – New to APAHE
• 6 – Pakikibaka with Purpose: Navigating Change, Power, and Protection.
• 7 – Rooted and Rising: Applied Improv for Community Resilience and Action
• 8 – Rooted & Rising: From Inherited Stories to Intentional Legacy A Storytelling, Belonging & Leadership Lab for the AANHPI Community
• 9 – WE WILL NOT BE ERASED: Remembering, Documenting, and Taking Action

Afternoon Sessions

• 10 – Belonging Through Story: An AANHPI Storytelling Lab for Leadership and Coalition
• 11 – California Intersegmental Partnerships for Sustainable AANHPI Student Success
• 12 – From Critique to Dialogue: Building AANHPI Leadership Capacity, Navigating Differences, and Transforming Organizational Climate
• 13 – From Law to Practice: Building California’s AANHPI-Serving Institutions After AB 2374
• 14 – From Resistance to Renaissance: Oakland’s Living Legacy of Liberation (Cultural Tour)
• 15 – Return to Self – The Inner Work of Leadership, Career Growth and Advancement.
• 16 – Storytelling for CCC AANHPI SAP: Strategies to Honor and Build Legacies
• 17 – Where Ancestral Knowledge Meets STEM: Lessons from Navigation and Canoe Building

Morning Pre-Conference Sessions

Wednesday, March 31, 2027 from 9am–12pm

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Asian Allyship Training for Higher Education

How can higher education professionals better understand the diversity of Asian, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities and translate that understanding into meaningful allyship?

This interactive, three-hour pre-conference workshop explores the histories, identities, stereotypes, and lived experiences that shape AANHPI communities. Participants will examine the diversity of the Asian diaspora, including East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, Pacific Islander, and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) communities, and explore the evolution of “Asian American” as a political term. Through historical examples, participants will consider how events continue to influence contemporary experiences.

The workshop then examines the Model Minority Myth, the Perpetual Foreigner stereotype, the Bamboo Ceiling, unconscious bias, microaggressions, and the difference between intent and impact. Participants will learn practical strategies for preventing and addressing bias, including the PAUSE method, calling in versus calling out, and the 5 Ds of bystander intervention.

Through facilitated discussions, reflection activities, and practical scenarios, participants will practice approaching unfamiliar experiences with curiosity, responding to bias, and building meaningful connections across differences. Designed for higher education professionals across institutional contexts, this workshop offers an adaptable foundation for fostering culturally responsive campus environments and supporting Asian/APISAA students, faculty, and staff.

Participants will leave with concrete strategies they can apply in classrooms, student affairs, campus leadership, and everyday interactions to strengthen understanding, interrupt bias, and cultivate a culture of care and belonging.

Presenters

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BCNA My Future: From Past Treads to Possible Futures

BCNA™ My Future: From Past Treads to Possible Futures is an interactive leadership and career development workshop designed to help AANHPI professionals reflect on the experiences that have shaped them, recognize the strengths and capacities they already carry, and intentionally prepare for future possibilities.

AANHPI professionals may navigate stereotypes, invisibility, expectations to conform, or career environments in which their experiences and leadership potential are not always fully recognized. This workshop creates space to acknowledge those realities while helping participants recognize their agency, build on the strengths and capacities they already carry, and make intentional choices about how they move toward stronger possible futures.

Using BCNA™ Be Curious. Navigate. Adapt.™ — participants will examine their Past Treads, identify transferable capacities developed through experience, map their current Leadership Spheres, and explore multiple Possible Futures. They will assess the strengths they already bring, identify capacities they may want to deepen, and design Future Treads and Practice Fields that help them build future readiness.

Participants will translate reflection into action through a 90-Day Movement Plan and explore catalytic leadership through three roles: Door Opener, Builder, and Amplifier—creating access, building possibilities and capacity, and extending impact through collaboration.

The workshop does not assume there is one correct career path. Instead, it helps participants move from current state toward stronger possible futures through curiosity, agency, intentional choices, practice, evidence, adaptation, and renewal.

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From CCW to Pasifika Cultural Wealth: Reimagining Critical Frameworks Through Indigenous Pasifika Epistemologies

Community cultural wealth (CCW) transformed how higher education recognizes the strengths students bring, shifting the question from what students lack to what they carry. Yet CCW, like the critical race theory it builds upon, was not developed from Pasifika experiences. Even TribalCrit, which centers Indigenous sovereignty, does not fully account for Pasifika epistemologies, territorial colonial status, or the relational values that shape Pasifika identity. This immersive pre-conference workshop moves from CCW to Pasifika cultural wealth. Facilitated by a CHamoru scholar and the first CHamoru administrator at Saddleback College, the workshop draws on her Indigenous phenomenological research and kostumbren CHamoru to reread Yosso’s six forms of capital through CHamoru values such as fuetsan CHamoru (cultural strength), inafa’maolek (restoring harmony and balance), and chenchule’ (reciprocity). It introduces three proposed extensions to CCW: cosmological, genealogical, and ecological capital. Because no Pasifika-specific critical race framework yet exists, participants will also co-construct what kostumbren CHamoru suggests such a framework would require. Throughout, participants return to one guiding question: does this lens reflect the ocean or the empire? The empire reads Pasifika students through deficit and assimilation; the ocean recognizes the relational, ancestral wealth they carry. Through a storytelling and legacy circle, participants share material culture, objects that hold their own lineage, as embodied knowledge and connect it to forms of cultural wealth. In an action lab, they apply this lens to a program or practice on their campus, guided by a critical caution: celebrating cultural wealth must never excuse institutions from changing the conditions that make it necessary. Participants leave with a culturally grounded framework and an action plan to recognize Pasifika cultural wealth at their institutions.

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LEAP Advance: Continuing to Move Forward

This preconference session is for individuals who have completed the LEAP Advance or LDPHE leadership program.

Leadership development is a constant process. LEAP Advance provides a supportive and safe place to continue to explore, share and grow. Program alumni will share their leadership journeys and lessons learned. Case studies will provide participants with strategies to address threats to DEI efforts, campus conflicts, and critical leadership decisions. (Shortened version: Designed for LEAP Advance and LDPHE alumni, this session supports continued leadership growth through shared experiences, reflection, and case studies. Participants will learn strategies to navigate threats to DEI efforts, campus conflicts, and critical leadership decisions in a supportive environment)

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New to APAHE

Coming soon… 

Presenters

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Pakikibaka with Purpose: Navigating Change, Power, and Protection

For educators committed to equity and transformation, leadership carries both purpose and risk. Those who challenge institutional practices may be labeled, isolated, or perceived as difficult, placing professional credibility, relationships, and even employment at risk.

Filipino educators often create spaces of care and belonging while navigating institutions that undervalue their knowledge, rely on their labor, or resist change. How do we act on our purpose while protecting ourselves and one another?

This interactive three-hour preconference takes participants on a Filipino-centered leadership journey from Pag-Iral, grounding ourselves in identity, beingness, and purpose, to Pakikibaka, navigating struggle, power, and institutional change with courage and strategy.

Building on our 2026 APAHE workshop, Pag-Iral: Cultivating Our Beingness with Purpose, this session draws on Filipino cultural teachings to connect being, relationships, and action. Participants will explore pag-iral (existence), panloob na kapangyarihan (inner power), layunin (purpose), kapwa (shared humanity), and pamana (legacy), then apply these reflections through pakikibaka: purposeful struggle for change.

Through interactive activities, participants will map institutional power, identify allies, practice responding to resistance, and explore strategies for collective protection. Each participant will develop a Change + Protection Strategy addressing a real institutional challenge, including relationships, risks, boundaries, and actions needed to sustain their work.

Aligned with APAHE’s Rooted and Rising theme, participants will leave with actionable strategies for institutional change while remaining grounded in their identity, connected to community, and intentional about protecting themselves and one another.

Presenters

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Rooted and Rising: Applied Improv for Community Resilience and Action

This interactive session expands upon our foundational work using applied improvisational theater to foster connection, shifting into a collaborative teaching model. We explore how core improv principles like “Yes…And,” structured play, failing forward, and unscripted collective storytelling can be adapted for campus multicultural centers and student retention initiatives. A special guest educator who attended last year’s workshop joins us alongside her students to share real-world insights on implementing these practices, discussing practical adjustments and student impact. Participants will engage in embodied activities, examine actionable strategies for building psychological safety, and leave with repeatable tools to strengthen their campus communities.

Presenters

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Rooted & Rising: From Inherited Stories to Intentional Legacy A Storytelling, Belonging & Leadership Lab for the AANHPI Community

Rooted & Rising: From Inherited Stories to Intentional Legacy invites AANHPI higher education professionals, students, and community leaders into an immersive exploration of what we inherit, what we transform, and what we intentionally pass forward.

Our roots hold more than history. They carry the sacrifices, cultural wisdom, survival strategies, expectations, silences, and dreams of those who came before us. Some of these inheritances sustain us; others may no longer serve who we are becoming. As APAHE commemorates 40 years of advocacy and collective action, this workshop asks participants to consider: What must we preserve? What are we ready to transform? And what will we cultivate for those who come next?

Through guided storytelling, reflection, somatic grounding, and facilitated Legacy Circles, participants will explore three interconnected dimensions of becoming: Rooted—recognizing the people, histories, identities, and cultural wisdom that shaped us; Rising—reclaiming voice, visibility, belonging, and agency; and Reaching Back—translating personal growth into mentorship, advocacy, community care, and institutional action.

Drawing upon Lei Lei Sengchanthalangsy’s Rooted & Becoming framework and lived experience as a Lao refugee, first-generation professional, executive, storyteller, and community advocate, the workshop moves beyond resilience as simply enduring adversity. Instead, participants examine resilience as the capacity to transform what we inherit into greater possibility for ourselves and others.

Participants will leave with a personalized Rooted & Rising Legacy Action Map, identifying what they will carry forward, what they will release, how they will rise, and one concrete action they will take to strengthen belonging and opportunity within their institution or community.

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WE WILL NOT BE ERASED: Remembering, Documenting, and Taking Action

This session echoes the theme of AANAPISI Week: WE WILL NOT BE ERASED: Remembering, Documenting, and Taking Action. During our time together we will recall the history and impact of AANAPISIs, consider ways to document the difference these investments made in students’ lives and institutional capacity and take action to protect and strengthen the programs that make educational opportunity possible.

As we acknowledge the impact and achievements AANAPISIs have had in providing a powerful platform for organizations, institutions, and communities to uplift and support historically underserved AANAPISI students we will aim to:

1. Raise awareness and reflect on the impact of AANAPISIs;

2. Keep fighting the fight: Strengthen our national network of supports, advocates, and champions;

3. Support federal policy leaders who are pushing for sustained investments in AANAPISIs and their students.

Over the twelve years the AANAPISI/APAHE Community has worked together to build an incredibly strong coalition where we have shared our successes and challenges, campus to campus, region to region, ultimately, to better serve our students.

In the last year, the infrastructure that we worked so hard to build has been dismantled, but WE WILL NOT BE ERASED!!! Please join us so together, we can re-envision how we will continue serve our AANHPI students. (Shortened version: Echoing AANAPISI Week’s theme, “We Will Not Be Erased,” this session reflects on AANAPISI history and impact, explores ways to document student and institutional outcomes, strengthens national advocacy networks, and identifies actions to sustain federal investment and protect educational opportunities for AANHPI students.

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Afternoon Pre-Conference Sessions

Wednesday, March 31, 2027 from 1:30pm–4:30pm

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Belonging Through Story: An AANHPI Storytelling Lab for Leadership and Coalition

This three hour workshop teaches storytelling as a professional competency for AANHPI leaders: telling your own story with intention, listening to invite others to share their stories, and using both to build belonging and coalition across communities.

Part skill building workshop, part story circle, part action lab, this is a working session, not a lecture. The model is Belonging Through Story, a three night series the APID employee resource group at Long Beach City College launched in Spring 2027. You choose one of its three prompts (Rootedness: food, home, and culture; The Leap: risk, courage, and how you or your family got here; Wisdom: lessons received and passed on), draft a personal story in five SCALE parts (Start, Challenge, Action, Learning, Effect), and name the change it holds. In pairs, you practice asking and listening, then tell the story and retell it for a different audience. At mixed story circles, you hear stories side by side and name what connects them, because common ground is where coalitions begin.

A design lab closes the session. With a planning guide, you adapt the series (themes, format, partners) to your campus or organization and set a date for the first step.

You leave with a practiced story, questions that draw out other people’s stories, and actionable steps that move storytelling into your leadership and coalition building competencies.

Presenters

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California Intersegmental Partnerships for Sustainable AANHPI Student Success

Amid federal funding cuts to higher education, including the Asian American, Native American, and Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) grant, the State of California continues to invest in our AANHPI community. California Ed. Code § 79511 established the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Student Achievement Program (AANHPI SAP), which delivers $16 million, in perpetuity, to eligible California Community Colleges and California State Universities.

Supporting AANHPI students across California higher education requires intentional relationships, shared strategies, and pathways that span systems. This session will bring together higher education professionals to explore how they can strengthen intersegmental collaboration to support AANHPI and underserved students regarding access, belonging, transfer, and success.

This pre-conference session will be open to participants from all higher education systems, including those that do not receive AANHPI Student Achievement Program funding, to participate in learning and interactive activities. Building on lessons from the California AANHPI Intersegmental Summit, participants will examine the relationships, data, resources, and institutional practices needed to create sustainable partnerships. Particular attention will be given to sustaining AANHPI-focused work within a changing federal funding landscape, including opportunities to build upon infrastructure, partnerships, and practices developed through AANAPISI, AANHPI SAP, and other initiatives.

Through relationship mapping, peer discussion, sustainability reflection, and collaborative planning, participants will identify existing strengths and gaps within their institutions. Attendees will leave with an actionable partnership commitment and strategies for aligning programs, sharing information, strengthening transfer pathways, and carrying AANHPI student success work across institutional and segment boundaries. (Shortened version: This session explores cross-system collaboration to advance AANHPI student access, belonging, transfer, and success amid changing federal funding. Participants will map relationships, identify institutional strengths and gaps, and develop actionable partnerships to sustain AANHPI-focused initiatives and strengthen student success across California higher education.)

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From Critique to Dialogue: Building AANHPI Leadership Capacity, Navigating Differences, and Transforming Organizational Climate

AANHPI higher education professionals often navigate a complex intersection of institutional power dynamics and distinct AANHPI cultural factors. Grounded in collectivist norms, AANHPI leaders frequently face cultural expectations around group harmony, deference to seniority/authority, avoiding open conflict, and masking emotions. When combined with complex institutional power dynamics, political tensions, and campus polarization that harbor a fear of open conflict or power hoarding, the ability to lead constructive dialogue across differences is essential for community well-being and institutional change. This 3-hour interactive pre-conference workshop introduces From Critique to Dialogue: Navigating Differences, a cohort-based program developed at UC Berkeley.

Designed as a hands-on skill-building workshop and action lab, participants will experience key dialogue methodologies (e.g., active listening, showing up in conflict, and addressing challenging speech) and design an actionable implementation plan to foster inclusive climate and dialogue within their home institutions. Additionally, the workshop directly addresses contexts of conflict to help AANHPI leaders reframe conflict from a threat into a tool for growth, coalition building, and true institutional belonging.

Presenters

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From Law to Practice: Building California’s AANHPI-Serving Institutions After AB 2374

AANHPI higher education professionals often navigate a complex intersection of institutional power dynamics and distinct AANHPI cultural factors. Grounded in collectivist norms, AANHPI leaders frequently face cultural expectations around group harmony, deference to seniority/authority, avoiding open conflict, and masking emotions. When combined with complex institutional power dynamics, political tensions, and campus polarization that harbor a fear of open conflict or power hoarding, the ability to lead constructive dialogue across differences is essential for community well-being and institutional change. This 3-hour interactive pre-conference workshop introduces From Critique to Dialogue: Navigating Differences, a cohort-based program developed at UC Berkeley.

Designed as a hands-on skill-building workshop and action lab, participants will experience key dialogue methodologies (e.g., active listening, showing up in conflict, and addressing challenging speech) and design an actionable implementation plan to foster inclusive climate and dialogue within their home institutions. Additionally, the workshop directly addresses contexts of conflict to help AANHPI leaders reframe conflict from a threat into a tool for growth, coalition building, and true institutional belonging.

Presenters

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From Resistance to Renaissance: Oakland’s Living Legacy of Liberation (Cultural Tour)

Experience Oakland as a living classroom of resistance, resilience, and community transformation. This cultural journey connects the 60-year legacy of the Black Panther Party, the resistance to Proposition 187, Oakland’s hip-hop movement, and contemporary LGBTQIA+ and community empowerment initiatives.

Featuring the Women of the Black Panther Party Mural and Museum, City of Refuge, and Homies Empowerment, participants will explore how communities in Oakland galvanized to build spaces of liberation, healing, education, and collective care.

More than a tour, this experience is an invitation to reflect on how yesterday’s struggles inform today’s leadership—and how we move from belonging to action, from resistance to institutional transformation.

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Return to Self – The Inner Work of Leadership, Career Growth and Advancement

What if some of the behaviors you have come to see as “just who you are” are actually patterns you developed to feel safe, belong, succeed, or protect yourself?

Throughout our lives and careers, we develop ways of navigating the world—staying quiet, over-delivering, seeking approval, avoiding conflict, striving for perfection, or making ourselves smaller. These patterns may have helped us succeed, but they can also limit our leadership, visibility, relationships, and career advancement.

In this highly interactive three-hour workshop, we will explore the inner work behind how we show up at work and how our patterns can influence the choices we make in our careers. The session will begin with Suha Patel’s TEDx style talk, What If It’s Not Your Personality?, introducing the idea that what we perceive as personality may sometimes be an adaptation to earlier experiences and environments.

Participants will then have an opportunity to identify their own patterns, understand what those patterns may have been protecting, and explore what becomes possible when we have greater awareness and choice. Through reflection, discussion, experiential exercises, and practical career-development tools, we will connect self-awareness and emotional regulation to leadership presence, confidence, voice, visibility, boundaries, and career advancement.

The workshop will move from awareness to release to action, helping participants consider not only what they want to achieve, but who they want to be as they achieve it.

The goal is not to become someone else in order to succeed. It is to return to a more authentic, grounded version of ourselves—and lead and advance from there.

Presenters

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Storytelling for CCC AANHPI SAP: Strategies to Honor and Build Legacies

Storytelling can be a compelling way, when done strategically, to convey the narrative of your program, its impact, accomplishments, and contributions to the institution. Quantitative data alone does not tell the full story; context matters. The 2026 AANAPISI Week theme, “We Will Not Be Erased: Remembering, Documenting, and Taking Action” is a reminder that storytelling can be asserted as a strategy to honor the work and build a legacy that can lead toward institutionalization. During the 2024 AANAPISI Preconference leadership panel, Dr. Leroy Morishita (retired CSU East Bay President) remarked that conversations around institutionalization has to happen right from the beginning. Given the defunding of AANAPISI programs by the current administration and acknowledging that AANHPI SAP funding limited, how can you convey the justification of need for campus resources. As Dr. John Hernandez, President of Irvine Valley College, asserted, institutional investment reflects a lasting commitment to identity-based programs. Part of the program’s goal is to demonstrate the rationale and justification for that investment and how you tell that story can make the difference in longevity.

Are you of the 51 CCC AANHPI SAP campuses? Attend this preconference session to explore how to tell your story, share best practices, and complete one mini-project to practice the art of storytelling: How can you advocate for your program? Who is your intended audience? What is the purpose? What do you want to happen as a result of telling your story? Why does visibility matter? These may be questions asked of you or ones you have considered.

For this interactive session, we ask each attendee from participating CCC AANHPI SAP campuses to bring artifacts (e.g., data, photos, videos, flyers) that could be incorporated into the mini-project activity. Low-tech and high-tech strategies will be explored. Download the CANVA application in advance; no prior experience required.

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Where Ancestral Knowledge Meets STEM: Lessons from Navigation and Canoe Building

Long before STEM became an academic term, Pacific Islander seafarers applied mathematics, engineering, environmental observation, and problem-solving to build canoes and navigate the ocean. Master Canoe Builder, Mario “Sakman” Borja, will share Indigenous Pacific navigation practices that use the sun, stars, wind, waves, currents, and other environmental cues for seafaring. These practices show that careful observation, pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, and repeated testing are part of both ancestral knowledge and contemporary STEM learning.

Using storytelling, visuals, and hands-on examples, the presentation will explore how canoe building and navigation connect culture, identity, mental wellness, confidence, leadership, and community. Attendees will actively participate in navigation exercises, using hand positions, body orientation, and visual guides to: (1) explore how seafarers historically determined direction and (2) understand the connection to contemporary engineering and mathematics. The session positions seafaring, particularly Chamorro seafaring, not only as cultural history, but as living knowledge that can inspire future generations of learners, educators, builders, navigators, and innovators. Finally, attendees will consider how colleges and universities can recognize cultural practitioners as knowledge holders and makers, connect AANHPI students with community expertise, and create learning experiences rarely available in traditional classrooms.

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