On April 25, 2013 the Asian Law Caucus honored the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) with the Bill Sorro Community Activist Award. Film by Joshua Chuck.

For forty years, the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) has educated, organized and empowered the low income and working class immigrant Chinese community in San Francisco to build collective power with other oppressed communities to demand justice for all people. Through organizing, leadership development, and alliance building, CPA organizes working families to build power with other communities of color and working people to improve their lives. CPA’s grassroots approach treats each community member as a potential leader with the power to bring about change, not just in his/her own life or circumstances, but for the community as a whole. Through that model, and over the last 40 years, CPA has changed the landscape for poor and working class immigrants in the city by organizing workers, tenants, seniors and young people across ethnic and language lines, to fight for tenant rights, affordable housing, and key worker protections, including San Francisco’s landmark Paid Sick Leave and Health Care Security Ordinances.
Founded in 1972 (the same year as the Asian Law Caucus), CPA has been a long-standing partner and ally of ALC. More recently, CPA has led the Progressive Workers Alliance’s fight against wage theft in San Francisco. Those efforts have included CPA’s pivotal worker-led Check, Please! survey about health and working conditions in San Francisco’s Chinatown restaurants, the passage of the 2011 Anti-Wage Theft Ordinance, which gave teeth to the city’s minimum wage enforcement efforts, and the creation of the city’s wage theft prevention task force.
CPA has also been a natural and powerful partner for the Caucus’ Employment & Labor Rights Program, which the Caucus re-launched in April 2011. Because of CPA’s organizing work, countless workers have been empowered to come forward and file and pursue claims to vindicate their rights. In joint cases together, CPA and the Caucus have won over half a million dollars in back pay and settlements for low-income immigrant workers in 2012 alone. CPA’s organizing work has also given these legal cases and victories a broader community context that adds power and resonance to the workers’ struggles that those cases represent.
CPA’s work truly embodies Bill Sorro’s progressive activist and organizing spirit and commitment to low-income Chinatown residents and the broader San Francisco immigrant community. We are proud to partner with CPA in defense of our communities.