This year's theme continues to build on previous convention themes with the goal of encouraging necessary and difficult conversations that can strengthen research, practice, and advocacy efforts in Asian American mental health. Our theme for this year focuses on individual and community empowerment that centers around (re)claiming space, uplifting our voices, and acknowledging all the intersecting identities that make us unique. Intersectionality is defined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw as “how overlapping or intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, or discrimination.” Our hope is that this theme will be a call to action to honor those that inspire us to keep fighting for our values and beliefs while acknowledging the efforts of AAPA’s current and past members.
“Throwing rocks, building bridges” is a tribute to the past, present, and future of AAPA. We stand upon the shoulders of our elders - the ones who have provided the rocks necessary for the current generation to throw. As rock throwers and agitators, the current generation pushes the boundaries necessary to successfully propel AAPA into the future, with the recognition that we are in the same fight. Our elders laid the foundation from where we build the bridges to our common goals. By encouraging members to acknowledge our past and present, we aim to move towards breaking down walls and building bridges between AAPI and other groups, our multiple identities, and subgroups within AAPA in celebration for the future of our organization.
Rev. Trinity A. Ordona, Ph.D.
Rev. Trinity A. Ordona, Ph.D. is a lesbian Filipino-American college teacher, activist, community organizer, and ordained minister residing in the San Francisco Bay area. She is notable for her grassroots work on intersectional social justice. Impressively, Trinity has a 50-year history of civil rights activism in local, national and international arenas. Her current activism includes issues of voice and visibility for Asian/Pacific gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals and their families, lesbians of color, and survivors of sexual abuse. She is co-founder and board member of numerous initiatives such as the Asian/Pacific Islander Family Pride (APIFP), an organization that provides resources to parents and siblings of API LGBT people. She has also received several awards including: the UCSF Chancellor's Award for Public Service, Northern California GLBT Historical Society Award for Individual Historic Achievement, the Bay Area Career Women’s Lesbian of Achievement, Vision and Action Award, “The 20 Most Influential Lesbian Professors” by Curve Magazine, and the “Phoenix Award” (along with her life partner, Desiree Thompson) by the Asian/Pacific Islander Queer Women and Transgender Community (APIQWTC) of San Francisco.
Trinity received her doctorate in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz where she studied social movements with Barbara Epstein, Judy Yung and Angela Davis. She has published widely and presented in community and academic venues across the U.S. and in Canada, Japan, India, and the Philippines. She currently teaches classes on lesbian relationships, queer communities of color, racial and ethnic groups in the U.S., and techniques for abuse recovery at City College of San Francisco and will retire at the end of 2018. In addition to teaching, Trinity founded and coordinated Healing For Change, a CCSF student organization that sponsored campus-community healing events directed to survivors of violence and abuse. As an ordained minister, Trinity works with survivors of sexual violence, teaching self-healing meditation and facilitating access to non-discursive healing modalities from Western and Eastern healing traditions for underserved and marginalized racial, ethnic, and sexual minority populations. In 2015, she and her sister, Francesca Ordona Hollingsworth, founded Inner Beauty Healing (www.innerbeautyhealing.us) to provide access to these healing tools to the public.
