DAMAYAN 2022 KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Year 2022 is supposed to be a year of exciting membership consolidation, following our huge membership expansion in 2020 & 2021 during the pandemic, and the unprecedented victory of excluded workers. With our help, over 200 Filipino excluded workers received more than $3 million from the NYS Excluded Workers Fund. We recently developed our digital organizing strategy and it expanded our outreach to inform and mobilize our excluded workers to get the money, the safety net that they deserve!
But what would be an exciting membership consolidation and expansion year, almost become a year of big divide in our community, caused by the highly contested presidential election in the homeland. Also, 2022 was greatly impacted by the vicious anti-Asian hate and violence. However, like the bamboo tree, Filipinos are resilient and so year 2022 will be marked by our community’s strength, defiance and resilience in the face of hate and historical revisionism in the Philippines.
We would like to thank the Asian American Federation, the New York Community Trust and the New York Foundation for their funding support of our anti-hate work. With funding support, we organized safety trainings in partnership with the Nonviolent Peaceforce and Center for Anti-Violence Education. Since January 2022, over 250 community members have attended these safety trainings that ranged from self-defense skills trainings, safety in the streets and subways, to community safety planning.
In 2022, we won an astonishing 13 T-visa approvals - the highest number in a single year since Damayan’s founding! Since 2008, when we launched Baklas, we have helped 70 survivors win humanitarian Trafficking visas. 33 of them reunited their families and brought 67 children and 24 spouses. Yes, we are growing a community of Filipino trafficking survivors and their families in NYC which is indeed amazing!
Through the Trafficking Victims Assistance Program (TVAP), we provided direct financial assistance to 26 trafficking survivors in 2022, redistributing around $53,000. Additionally, the Citywide Immigrant Legal Empowerment Collaborative (CILEC) funds our robust case management work. In 2022, we served around 100 workers, connecting them to free legal consultations and intensive case support.
While the Excluded Workers Fund application closed in 2021, we are proud of our sustained commitment and work to provide case management assistance and service referrals for the EWF recipients and community members including tax preparation services, IDNYC, NYC CARE, and more. In September, we held a free health screening in Woodside that was attended by over 100 community members. With support from the Asian American Foundation, we also conducted an outreach and information campaign on COVID vaccination and anti-vaccine hesitancy, and referred over 60 community members to vaccination services.
2022 is also a year that tested and affirmed the power of political education in forging unity in our community. Last October and November, we mobilized our survivors, leaders and members and together with the staff, we finished 3 of the 4-part Damayan Workers Academy. We invited labor and immigration attorneys to present a deeper education on workers and immigrant rights of undocumented workers. The final session will be held in January at the People’s Forum in Manhattan.
It’s been another remarkable year of educating, organizing, and mobilizing Filipino migrant workers. We are deeply proud of the work this organization has done in 2022 and the last 2 decades.