Executive Director, CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities

Cathy Dang is currently the Executive Director of CAAAV and has organized in labor and community-led planning for over a decade with Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, the Retail Action Project and other grassroots organizations. In her time with the Retail Action Project, she helped win the first wage increase in the flagship store of 700+ employees and organizing workers to help win a racial discrimination case affecting Black women workers. At CAAAV, she has helped lead campaigns winning victories securing dozens of Chinatown tenants’ homes and language access in NYCHA. More recently, she has led CAAAV in fighting for accountability of former NYPD Officer Peter Liang in the killing of Akai Gurley, a Black father killed in a NYPD vertical patrol in NYCHA’s Pink Houses. She is originally from Ridgewood, Queens and Los Angeles, California, and a daughter of Chinese-Vietnamese refugee parents who raised her in a nail salon in Downtown Brooklyn.

CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities is a pan-Asian organization that organizes low-income Asian immigrants for systemic and institutional change towards racial, gender, and economic justice. Their primary area of organizing is housing justice in Chinatown and Queensbridge Public Housing. While living conditions can become deplorable, CAAAV fights for safe and healthy living conditions in addition to preventing massive displacement of long-time residents and families. CAAAV has organized on police accountability since the 90s recognizing that in order to win racial justice we need to tackle the system that perpetuates the root causes of racism and economic inequality.