Our Mission:
APA | FIVE's singular mission is to educate, mobilize and inspire the next generation of Asian Pacific 
American leaders. By gathering our greatest role models with emerging young talents and creating a coalition of community organizations, we bring together all Asian Pacific Americans to promote active leadership, cultivate an interdisciplinary network and build a mentorship pipeline.
Our Name:
FIVE stands for the different professional sectors that we seek to unite: Business & Management, Education, Arts/Entertainment, Nonprofit, and Science/Technology. FIVE also stands for the various groups within Asian Pacific America that have yet to cohesively mobilize as one group: East Asian, Pacific Islanders, Southeast Asian, South Asian and Hapa / Mixed Heritage. Finally, FIVE stands for the premise that five individuals can make a great impact if they work together on a common goal.
Our Interdisciplinary Network:
Our community needs leaders to advance the causes of APAs and other minorities. But we need to help one another to ensure our collective success, whether we are CEOs, Nonprofit Directors, University Professors, Judges, Politicians, Journalists, Scientists, Artists, Movie Stars, Athletes, Bloggers, YouTube Founders or Survivor Winners. By broadening our horizons and meeting other active APAs across industries, we find potential investors, sponsors, clients, donors, volunteers, partners, consultants, advisors, mentors and friends who will support your next project.
Our Mentorship Pipeline:
We need a pipeline to connect our emerging, young leaders with willing and able role models. Mentorship is the only way we can develop our greatest leaders, by ensuring that lessons are passed down to the next generation so we don’t waste time reinventing the wheel. Our predecessors have valuable resources and contacts to contribute to the next generation, and our up-and-coming leaders need to take advantage of their wisdom. A common lament we hear is that willing mentors are extremely difficult to find, while established leaders seem to feel that the next generation is lacking in initiative and passion. We believe that there are countless young professionals with the energy and vision who can achieve greatness with the right support and there are many leaders who can commit the time to pass along their lessons. We just want to simplify the process of finding those people.
Our Community Coalition:
Friendship and collaborations across our professional sectors is necessary to strengthen our network. In the real world, it’s all about who you know. The APA community today is still split up into subgroups, all of which are important, but we tend to stay in those same environments. APA | FIVE unites our groups across professions, ethnic backgrounds, and generations to create a Coalition of Asian Pacific Americans.
Our Members:
APA | FIVE charges no membership dues. Just put your name on the mailing list so we can send you our newsletter and let you know what is going on. APA | FIVE is a coalition of community organizations and we encourage you to be an active Asian Pacific American leader with many of our co-sponsors. If you feel like donating money, please do so! But you can also be a member just by volunteering, actively contributing your time and energy, attending various events, meeting people and making friends. Take a look at our community co-sponsors page for more opportunities to get involved!
Our Long-Term Goals:
Ideally, we would like to see INSPIRE become an annual conference that moves to different cities each year. Because we aspire to rally together all the APA organizations, we anticipate moving to big cities with the highest concentrations of Asians. San Francisco was the natural place to begin because of the historical significance as an entry point for immigrants from Asia, and the high percentage of APA leaders in business, tech, politics, academia, and the arts that reside in the Bay Area.
We believe APA | FIVE should grow organically, and hope that individual members will take the initiative to mold our next steps, so long as we stay true to our mission. We are most excited about the Family Reunions, where families from the Inspire Conference can gather together repeatedly throughout the year to continue their friendship and mentorship sessions.
