Who We Are

AASPIRES was founded in 2023 by 7 Southeast Asian American Stanford alumni, all of whom identify as first-generation and/or low-income children of refugees. Our shared experiences of growing up in underresourced refugee communities have deeply shaped how we value interdependence with and opportunities for young people from similar backgrounds. In particular, our lived realities of refugeeness, refugitude, and navigating the temporality of forced migration have shown us that these experiences–traumatic and transgenerational in nature–uniquely impact a person’s identities, sense of belonging, access to education, economic independence, and academic/career trajectories. These shared stories of resilience and fortitude brought us together to create something that we wished we had growing up: an organization that sets students up for opportunities by providing them with the kind of academic and personal support we always needed, but never had.

By standing in solidarity with each other and our allies, we have built AASPIRES as the first national organization dedicated to creating differentiated pathways of success for underrepresented Asian American students. We understand, firsthand, how institutions can, and have, homogenize(d) our bodies, histories, and stories. In hoping to reimagine the educational landscape, we empower AASPIRES Scholars to understand their positionalities as holders of knowledge and agents of change within their local, regional, and larger national contexts.

Our Founding Board comes from a vast array of professional fields, which include agriculture policymaking, DEI college admissions, public school college counseling, K-16 education, medicine, student services, and tech marketing. This diversity of expertise gives us unique insight into the the hidden challenges of higher education for students from underrepresented Asian American communities, and directly aids us in equipping AASPIRES Scholars with tools they need to be successful in and out of formal classroom spaces. Together, we use our combined and shared capital to: open doors for students, uplift marginalized and invisibilized Asian American communities, create uniquely curated learning opportunities for direct intellectual engagement, challenge narratives of the Model Minority Myth, and grow programs and partnerships that expand what people believe is possible for young folks from our communities.