Grace Pai

Director of Organizing, Asian Americans Advancing Justice/Chicago

Grace Pai has spent the last seven years organizing in Chicago toward racial, economic, and immigrant justice and has trained hundreds of organizers and community leaders across the country.

She joined Advancing Justice/Chicago in April 2018 as the senior community organizer, Midwest Region, and transitioned into her new role in November 2019. Grace has been training Asian American organizations and their staffs on power-building frameworks, civic engagement, and issue-based advocacy. To proactively prepare for the possible increase of hate incidents, Grace is guiding Advancing Justice/Chicago to partner with New York-based nonprofit Hollaback! and Advancing Justice/DC to quickly plan and implement an aggressive scaling up of locally-led bystander hate incident intervention trainings for community members. It will adopt a train-the-trainer approach, starting with a core group of staff, leaders, and volunteers from existing partnerships and coalitions. As the field director for Asian American Advocacy Fund PAC, she built and managed a canvass program that knocked on the doors of more than 100,000 AAPI voters in the Atlanta metro area.

As an experienced community organizer with a demonstrated history of working to advance racial, economic, social, and environmental justice, Grace has built strong relationships with local institutions and elected officials to build coalitions and pass legislation and trained numerous leaders across the city and state. Grace’s commitment to community in Chicago combines legislative advocacy, coalition building, grassroots organizing, issue-based campaigns, and organizational management.