Andy Kang
National Director of Anti-Hate, The Asian American Foundation
2024
Andy Kang is TAAF’s Director of Anti-Hate and brings over a decade of experience in anti-hate work. While serving as Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Chicago, Andy’s team led the launch of the TEAACH Act, which made Illinois the first state in the country to mandate the teaching of Asian American history at the secondary level. In response to the rise in anti-Asian violence in Chicago, Andy also launched local bystander intervention trainings in partnership with Right to Be and CAIR-Chicago, and successfully advocated for the re-establishment of the Illinois Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes. Andy was one of the lead negotiators and strategists for the Illinois TRUST Act, the VOICES Act, and Automatic Voter Registration, and also advocated successfully to strengthen Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance in response to police abuse of a Chinese American woman.
He joins TAAF after having served as Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition and co-chair of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM), the largest national grassroots immigrant rights network. Andy holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a J.D. from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He currently lives in Philadelphia.
The effort to eradicate hate requires the active participation of every component of our society, to include governments, the private sector, communities of faith and indeed every aspect of civil society. There is no more urgent task in front of us. The organizers of the Eradicate Hate Global Summit are doing the United States and the world an enormous service by tackling hatred and extremism with a focus on honest dialogue and conversation, genuine learning and practical solutions. This will not happen overnight, but the Pittsburgh community’s leadership in this effort is genuinely inspiring and motivating.
