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Political Empowerment and Voter Education
Community Political Clout
Formerly seen as a newcomer community with few votes, Boston's Chinese community has increased its voter turnout and political clout in the past decade. Today, Chinatown is one of the city's highest-turnout neighborhoods.
Chinatown, while it represents less than one-quarter of the area’s Chinese American population, has the highest concentration of Chinese American voters and is a strategic base from which to organize for political visibility, representation, and clout. At the same time, Chinese Americans need to expand our influence and participation in other neighborhoods and communities in which we live.
The goal of the Political Empowerment Project is to organize for grassroots democratic participation of ordinary Chinese community members in the political decision-making process in order to build collective community power.
Our strategy is to combine participatory issue-based organizing with broad-based voter education and registration, expand our local political base, organize for election reform and voting rights, and build coalitions with other disenfranchised communities.Recent 
highlights
and accomplishments:
° Helped immigrant citizens stand up for their rights and work with the City of Boston and US Department of Justice to secure bilingual Chinese and Vietnamese ballots in a historic voting rights settlement.
° Worked as part of a citywide coalition effort to win new reforms in Boston's Inclusionary Development Policy and the City of Boston's definition of income standards for affordable housing.
° Supported youth-led campaign to secure $35,000 in the City of Boston capital budget for a feasibility and siting study for a Chinatown library.
° Conducted 31 voter education workshops in the past year for subsidized housing tenants in Chinatown, South End, Kenmore, Allston-Brighton, and Mission Hill.
° Produced and mailed 11 pieces of Chinese bilingual non-partisan voter education materials to Chinese American voters citywide.
° Continued to play a core role in the New Majority and the Asian Pacific American Agenda Coalition to develop these agenda-driven coalitions.
° Anchoring the community campaign to safeguard the use of transliterated, or phoneticized, Chinese names for candidates on the bilingual ballot and to extend Chinese and Vietnamese bilingual ballots for Boston voters beyond 2008.
Links and Updates:
Vote November 6! Bilingual voter information for the 2007 city council race:
At-Large
Allston-Brighton
Op-Ed about Chinese transliterated names on the bilingual ballot
Chinese bilingual ballot timeline
Voting -- What Difference Does it Make? ( 選舉 — 帶來的不同？ )
Primary Election Voter Education Workshop Schedule (初選 - 選民教育講座時間表 )