Top Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Unsung Heroes 2009

Congratulations to Helen Gym!

Her nominators wrote:

As an organizer, Helen worked alongside the students of South Philadelphia High School who focused national attention on violence against Asian immigrant students in the wake of racial assaults at the local high school earlier this month. Working with the students, Helen and others helped the students organize a boycott of the school in order to demand that attention be paid to the real needs of Asian immigrant students at the school.

Helen and Asian Americans United formed a citywide coalition to attack predatory gambling and successfully defeat the placement of a casino next to Philadelphia Chinatown. Helen helped lead an organized media campaign on the issue that focused on things like credit use and the impact on neighborhoods.

As a co-founder of Parents United for Public Education, Helen and a group of public school parents helped turn over the Bureau of Revision of Taxes, Philadelphia’s real estate assessment agency notorious for its patronage. The group found that most of the agency’s patronage hires sat on the public school payroll. Partly as a result of this work, the agency is being mostly dismantled.

Helen has been a longtime activist in Philadelphia and has been a visible and vocal Asian voice on a number of progressive issues. She has been a leader in public education struggles (includes leading the fight to stop privatization in the Philly public schools, fighting for arts and music and more teachers in the public schools, helping found an education newspaper – the Public School Notebook – as well as a charter school), the immigration movement (including a national campaign to successfully seek justice for a Chinese businesswoman who miscarried twins during a violent deportation attempt and to highlight inhumane medical practices by ICE), and healthy communities (stopping a casino and stadium and building a school instead). More recently, she has taken up blogging at a local site www.youngphillypolitics.com where she takes on city politics, race and education issues as well as other significant ideas.

She is a a serious force for change: using street politics/media savvy/organizing background to offset dramatic power dynamics to win on campaigns and to help shape and create new perspectives for Asian America.  The Philadelphia Inquirer named Helen "Citizen of the Year."  Most recently the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education awarded Helen Gym the "National Award of Distinction" that "...recognizes a person of national or international reputation making an outstanding contribution in the field of education."