About 10 years ago, two young Asian Americans — Chavi Khanna Koneru and Ricky Leung — noticed that the major political parties in the United States were not doing enough to reach out to Asian American communities. So, in July 2016, they took matters into their own hands and formed NC Asian Americans Together.
Initially, Koneru was the group's first full-time employee and Leung served as its sole board member. Now, there are 24 full-time employees at the nonprofit, which reported a total revenue of nearly $5.5 million in 2024.
NCAAT has become a powerful force in not just mobilizing Asian Americans to vote, but also in organizing youth-focused civic engagement programs, providing artist grants, and running a large annual Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) heritage festival. Headquartered in Raleigh, NCAAT also recently opened up an office in Charlotte and has expanded outreach to Greensboro, Fayetteville, and other parts of the state.
But as its executive director and co-founder Chavi Khanna Koneru shares with WUNC News' Eli Chen, President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown and the overall hostile political climate has created many challenges for Asian Americans in the state and beyond — which has also had an impact on how the nonprofit supports immigrant communities in North Carolina.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I'd like to start by going back 10 years to 2016 when you and your co-founder, Ricky Leung, started NC Asian Americans together. What vision did the two of you have back then?
I think there's two versions of the story. There's the one where NCAAT was started because the AAPI population was growing rapidly, but the community's political power wasn't growing at the same rate, and we saw the opportunity to use our expertise to solve that problem.
The second, more personal story, though, is that since I moved to North Carolina with my family in 1989, I never felt like I belonged. Ricky felt the same way. When people referred to North Carolinians, in my mind, I was never part of that group. But suddenly, there were a lot more people that looked like me, and I remember being seven months pregnant with my first child and thinking, I never want him to experience what I did, that lack of belonging. And so creating NCAAT was an opportunity to create that political home for us, create that sense of belonging, and it surprisingly, not just for my children, but gave me a chance to feel that belonging. And now I proudly call myself a North Carolinian.
Your children are now older. Do they feel the same way?
Yeah, so my son turns 10 in July at the same time that NCAAT will be turning 10. And they do. It almost surprises them that I wouldn't have felt like a North Carolinian. They love this state, and they're really proud to be from here.
How much has Asian American voter engagement and political representation changed in the last 10 years?
So when we first started, there were no Asian American representation in the state legislature. Now we have four AAPI representatives. We have an Asian American caucus. We have Asian Americans across the state of North Carolina in everything — from city council to running for mayor.
And then also we've seen that in the turnout. So we hit a high in 2020 of 72% turnout. And then we've been really curious about what NCAAT's impact has been. So there was a Harvard study done on our impact in 2024 that found that of the unique voters that only NCAAT contacted, 80% of them turned out to vote, and that's higher than the state average.
We also found that for youth, 75% of them turned out to vote, and that was much higher than the state average, which was 52%. So that means that not only have we helped increase the AAPI turnout in general, but NCAAT has had a specific impact on that increase.
As a South Asian woman, what's your experience been like stepping into the advocacy space to represent Asian Americans?
When we first started in 2016, there was no playbook in North Carolina. There wasn't much of a playbook in the South. So I was traveling to California a lot to understand how Asian Americans in California were doing this work, and I was often the only South Asian in the room because at that time, the term Asian American, even 10 years ago, felt like it referred more to East Asians. And I think that has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. I just went to a conference a few weeks ago, and there was a group of South Asians there proudly calling themselves Asian Americans, and that shift has really helped us build that political voting block of Asian Americans. And I, I think it's been really helpful to explain to people that this is not meant to — for them to lose their own ethnic identity, but that it is a way for us to have political power.
There are so many different groups that can call themselves Asian Americans, and I think that's really beautiful, but I imagine that also can be really challenging. There are so many different ethnicities, languages spoken, and complex histories among the Asian American Pacific Islander diaspora here. And I'm wondering, what are the challenges of mobilizing such a diverse group of people, and how do you try to promote solidarity between them?
Yeah, it's very challenging. There's over 40 different AAPI languages spoken just in the state of North Carolina. And while we do run our hotline in up to 21 different languages, there are diverse histories. There's histories of conflict. There are other things that impact how people feel. And so I think that we are very conscious about how we use the term Asian American. We also often don't use the term AAPI because we haven't done a great job of engaging a lot of Pacific Islanders in the state, and we don't want to erase their unique history and identity. But we are careful to name it as a political identity. And one of the things we've found — we have a robust research and data hub at the organization — is that people are really seeking a sense of belonging. And especially in this political climate, what we can offer them is a political home based around this concept of coming together around the AAPI political identity.
And speaking of the current political climate, it's a huge endeavor to be leading an organization that advocates for immigrants during this time. What are you hearing from NCAAT's community base?
Well, I'll tell you a personal story. So my younger sister, who lives in Apex, was stopped by ICE officers right after she dropped her one-year-old off at daycare. Not that it matters, but she's born and raised in North Carolina, no criminal record, (and) was in her car. Her license plate could have been run. There was no reason to stop her other than racial profiling.
And so the fear that our community members are feeling is very, very valid, and we don't want to ignore that in our effort to ask people to vote. But our job is to then ask people to vote and then not leave them at the one-yard line. We want to help them all the way, which means we are running a very robust election protection program to make sure that when they go to the polls, even though there's that fear, the very real fear of ICE being there, we will be there to do our best to protect them. We also want people to know that they're not alone in this. We may not be able to solve every problem, but NCAAT's here to support them, and our hotline is open all year round.
NCAAT has offered resources to help immigrants with the naturalization process — how have those services been impacted by this current political climate?
So we know that there's more than 600,000 North Carolina residents that are at risk of delayed or denied naturalization at this point. While NCAAT has, for the last 10 years, offered naturalization clinics, we have paused that while we wait to see how folks who are already in the process, how their applications are received, and how long the wait is for them. It's important for us to continue to add to the electorate and to add to that Asian American political voting bloc, but we want to do so safely.
As you were saying earlier, political representation of Asian Americans in the state is on the rise. What do you think remain challenges to increasing representation in the state?
I think that we've done a lot around our leadership programs, but there's still a lot to be done where politics is still often in Asian American families something that is not talked about around the dinner table. It doesn't feel like as lucrative of a career as STEM programs. And part of that is true, that we do not pay our electeds enough in this state. But I think we've made a lot of strides towards that, and especially with youth, and that's what we're really eager to see is our youth running more. I think as we see them age into the electorate, graduate from college, and be able to run for offices, we will see more representation.
As of this year in 2026, compared to 10 years ago, what would you say that the organization's goals are now?
So I think our first 10 years were about being seen and recognizing the importance of this community and showing that we have the power to be the swing vote in many places. I think the next 10 years are about us building power at a deeper level. So the organization is really focused on switching over to a membership model. And once you sort of show that you have power, then the key is sharing that power with community members, and that's what our goal is for the next 10 years, to have our community members leading more of our efforts, to have them truly represent us. Instead of just coming to Asian American Advocacy Day and sharing their experiences, we want them to be those legislators that other NCAAT members are going to see.
To reach NC Asian Americans, call their hotline at 1-833-VOTE-NCAAT. The hotline is available in up to 21 languages.
