Community organizing is a core principle of Woori Center and a critical component of our theory of change. We believe the key to building a society wherein everyone lives and thrives together is building the progressive power of our most vulnerable community members through organizing.

 

Woori Center thus organizes the Korean and Asian American community in the Greater Philadelphia and beyond to collectively address immigrant justice issues. There are nearly 2 million undocumented Asian Americans living in the United States and roughly one out of every seven Korean Americans is undocumented. Pennsylvania is home to more than 42,000 Korean Americans. Given the sizable impacted population in Pennsylvania, Woori Center believes it is essential to organize our community here to make our city, state, and country a better place to live for all. We believe everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and to live together with their loved ones without the fear of separation, and we believe this can be achieved by building our collective power to make change. 

 

On a national level, Woori Center has joined NAKASEC and its affiliates in Illinois (HANA Center), New York (MinKwon Center), Texas (Woori Juntos), and Virginia (Hamkae Center) for the #Citizenship4All campaign to win a pathway to citizenship for all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. At a statewide level in Pennsylvania, Woori Center works alongside local immigrant justice organizations to advocate for legislative policy solutions for the immigrant community, including driver’s licenses for all and tuition equity. We have focused our community organizing work on three specific immigrant justice campaigns.