KOREAN IMMIGRANT WORKERS ADVOCATES OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
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Mission Statement
KIWA’s mission is to build the power of immigrant workers and residents and to organize a progressive grassroots leadership to transform our workplaces and communities, in Koreatown, Los Angeles and beyond. Since 1992, we have provided critical, high-quality services for low-income working people and tenants; organized community members to come together for change; developed leaders and provided a pathway to civic engagement.
About This Cause
KIWA is a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-industry worker center founded on March 1, 1992, just two months before the LA Civic Unrest. This civil crisis revealed to the world what the founders of KIWA already knew: that many communities within our urban core were in deep distress and in need of solutions. KIWA was founded to address many of the same conditions that gave rise to the unrest. Since 1992, KIWA has provided critical, high-quality services for low-income working people and tenants; organized community members to come together for change; developed leaders and provided a pathway to civic engagement, so that members of those communities most socially and economically marginalized can themselves voice their analyses and solutions and be heard; and advocates for city, county, and state policies the help create a more jut and livable Los Angeles. KIWA’s mission is to build the power of immigrant workers and residents and to organize a progressive grassroots leadership to transform our workplaces and communities, in Koreatown and beyond. By combining strategic campaigns, grassroots organizing, leadership development, services, policy advocacy, community-based research, and coalition building, KIWA has consistently found ways to win concrete changes impacting the lives of low-income workers and residents and to contribute to longer-term movement-building. KIWA is a well-known anchor for Korean progressives and immigrant community members, as well as a hub for multi-ethnic and intersectional social justice organizing in L.A. We remain committed to organizing as its core strategy to build grassroots power across lines of difference in the community to achieve systemic change. Our goal is to build a community union of residents and workers who can lead efforts and campaigns to win changes and create the communities we want to live in. KIWA has had a number of major achievements over the last five years: • Developed a worker-led popular education program, called “La Escuelita Verde”. The school functions as a space for empowering and mobilizing workers through skills building and political education, but also furthering membership recruitment and base building. • Established community contracts with the City of Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Los Angeles County to conduct minimum wage and wage enforcement outreach and education. At the County level, KIWA is the lead convener of a collaborative of 12 workers centers and is responsible for organizing and delegating roles and responsibilities, as well as invoicing and reporting. • As a Host Committee member of Alliance for Community Transit-LA (ACT-LA), which is a city-wide coalition advocating for a sustainable transit system that serves the interests of low-income communities and communities of color, KIWA has played a central role in bringing these groups together for the “Build Better LA” campaign, which passed Prop JJJ in the November 8th ballot—a policy that not only creates good jobs for local residents, but also increases affordable housing production in Los Angeles. • As a member of the Steering Committee of Raise the Wage, KIWA worked hard along with our partners in Coalition Against Wage Theft not only to raise the wage but also to ensure that effective wage-theft enforcement was a central part of our campaign. As a result of our efforts, in Summer 2015, the City passed legislation that created a pathway to $15 and recognized the need to enforce the wage for over 800,000 people in Los Angeles and their families. With the passage of the new minimum wage increase, we helped establish LA’s first Office of Wage Enforcement. • As a co-sponsor of SB 588 (De León) A Fair Day’s Pay, we developed with our partners a powerful bill that was signed into law by Governor Brown in Fall 2015. SB 588 has provided new tools that will dramatically improve collections for victims of wage theft in California. • KIWA completed multi-year process of developing Casa Yonde, a 52-unit affordable housing project in Koreatown, with LTSC. Moved into new home on the ground floor of Casa Yonde. 18 of the units are for formerly homeless TAY youth with a mental illness or families with a mentally ill adult. Launched tenant services program that includes workforce development. Although this itself is not organizing, we hired a tenant services coordinator with an organizing background, and who approaches her work with tenants as an organizer. • Vermont/Wilshire TOD campaign: The luxury mixed-use development by the JH Snyder Corp. was moving through approval process very quickly when KIWA placed the completely absent issue of affordable housing on the agenda. As a result of our organizing, Snyder committed through an MOU to support the development of 96 units of affordable housing in Koreatown. • Launched an economic development project based on mosaic art in 2011. This initiative was founded by a member leader who shared his skills with other members. It is a member committee and political space where members produce mosaic works of sustainable art, and also engage in political education and campaign discussions. • Secured $5 million in funding for a park in Koreatown by winning City Council amendment in February 2010 to include Koreatown Park among proposals for State-funding to increase parks in underserved communities. (This park project later fell through when the CRA was dismantled) • Prevented demolition of 23 rent-controlled housing units and opposed city permit to convert neighborhood block into a surface street parking lot, Fall 2009. • Won our “Raw Deal Campaign” for workers’ rights and against wage theft in 2013: Galvanized our members and allies and achieved media coverage of L.A. wage theft issue and our action in the NYT and in L.A. media market’s highest-rated English, Korean- and Spanish-language TV stations.