GAPA Foundation is rebranding to Prism Foundation!

After two years of extensive conversations with our community, we’re excited to announce our rebrand from GAPA Foundation to Prism Foundation. Don’t worry! Our mission and work to empower the Asian & Pacific Islander (API) LGBTQIA+ community through philanthropic funding and community events will remain the same.

You’re probably curious why we decided to make the change, so here are some quick points to cover our rationale behind this decision, our process, and the opportunities to better serve our community in 2020.

Summary: 

• Why we rebranded. We want to better represent the richness of our diverse API LGBTQIA+ community. Over time, we felt that “GAPA,” originally standing for the “Gay Asian Pacific Alliance,” did not accurately represent the full spectrum of identities, communities, and causes in the students and organizations that our scholarship, grants, and programs have historically funded.

• Our research process. We embarked on a two-year long rebranding initiative that included extensive interviews and focus groups with numerous API LGBTQIA+ nonprofit leaders, founding, former, and emeritus board members of GAPA Foundation, and many major donors.

• Our design process. We enlisted ten API LGBTQIA+ creatives as well as an online crowdsourcing campaign to generate over 150+ logo ideas.

• Our final decision. In the end, we chose “Prism Foundation,” meaning:

  • Prisms refract light into a spectrum of colors, much like how their scholarships and grants highlight diverse identities, communities, and causes in the API LGBTQIA+ community.

  • Prisms, as geometric shapes, represent the structural challenges that the API LGBTQIA+ community has and continues to face.

  • Finally, prisms represent building blocks for change. Their investment in leaders and organizations will serve as the foundation upon which the community can springboard off of to implement and realize change.

  We are truly grateful to all of you, our community and donors, who have supported GAPA Foundation in the past ten years. We hope that our rebrand is an exciting movement forward as we continue to grow as an organization.  

Read the full story of our rebranding process & rationale below!

I. Our Legacy

The History of GAPA Foundation

GAPA Foundation was created in 2010 as a 501c(3) philanthropic organization to provide funds and leverage resources to empower the Asian & Pacific Islander LGBTQIA+ community. Our vision is to achieve true equity, global inclusion, and radical empowerment of our collective Asian & Pacific Islander LGBTQIA+ community free from social, economic, and structural barriers.

As of 2019, we have given a total of over $200,000 in financial support to 40 students and 69 projects making impact in the API LGBTQIA+ community.

II. The Challenge

Why We’re Rebranding 

In our eight years of philanthropic giving, our funding portfolio has historically reflected an incredibly diverse group of API LGBTQIA+ students and organizations. Take students like:

• Vinita Chaudhry, a South Asian student studying Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Washington University;

• Harim Jung, a nonbinary graduate student pursuing their Master of Social Work at UPenn;

• Bo James Hwang, a transgender man studying pre-medical sciences at UCLA.

Or consider our grantee organizations such as API TransFusion, the Hmong American Women’s Association, the Lesbian Health Initiative of Houston, API Rainbow Parents, API Chaya, and many, many more.

Over time, we realized that while our funding portfolio was incredibly and intentionally diverse, our name did not accurately represent the spectrum of identities, causes, and communities we were supporting. “GAPA,” originally standing for the “Gay Asian Pacific Alliance,” felt limiting and at-times unintentionally exclusive. As a foundation working in direct service to students and organizations across the API LGBTQIA+ spectrum, we felt that we must embody the same value of diversity in our brand.

III. What We Did

The Rebranding Process

From January 2018 to January 2020, we conducted an intensive brand research and development process in partnership with API LGBTQIA+ community members.

We started with interviews and focus groups with leaders from API LGBTQIA+ organizations like APIENC, APIQWTC, Cal Q&A, NQAPIA, San Francisco Community Health Center, API TransFusion, and PFLAG. We also interviewed founding, former, and emeritus board members of GAPA Foundation as well as several of our donors.

From there, we led extensive, internal brainstorming and ideation sessions with current board members along with feedback from our interviews with community members. The result was over 65+ possible names, and after a rigorous evaluation process, we ultimately landed on one: Prism Foundation.

Finally, we led two crowdsourcing campaigns and worked with ten API LGBTQIA+ designers to generate over 150+ possible logo designs. To decide on the final design, we again surveyed the API LGBTQIA+ community members, and landed on our current brand.

III. Where We Are Now

The Meaning Behind Prism Foundation

For us, a prism is a clean, modern, and symbolic motif that offers three core meanings related to our mission and work empowering the API LGBTQIA+ community.

Name

• Prisms highlight diversity. Prisms refract light into a spectrum of colors. This is the most literal translation of our work in highlighting the diverse identities, communities, and causes within the API LGBTQIA+ community through our student scholarships, organizational grants, and other programming.

• Prisms represent structural challenges. Prisms are three-dimensional shapes that represent the structural challenges that the API LGBTQIA+ community has and continues to face. Our organization combats these structural challenges through our philanthropic activities and other innovative programs to address the ever-changing hardships of our community.

• Prisms represent building blocks for change. Our investment in future leaders and the phenomenal organizations we fund and partner with will serve as the foundation upon which our community can springboard off of to implement and realize change.

Colors

• Pink is a bright and playful color that also represents the compassion that drives our organization. Pink also alludes to the LGBTQIA+ pink triangle—acknowledging our place within the LGBTQIA+ community.

• Navy is a mature color, embodying feelings of dependability and also safety. These tenants govern the way we operate as a foundation and our responsibility to serve the community in a trustworthy way.

Why not other names?

In the end, rather than name our organization after an ever-evolving and ever-diverse community, we decided to name our organization after a concept that not only could reflect the full spectrum of identities in the Asian & Pacific Islander LGBTQIA+ community but also represents an idea that our community could rally behind.

IV. What’s Next

A Commitment to Growth

Our mission, vision, and work forward as the Prism Foundation remains the same—to empower the API LGBTQIA+ community through student scholarships, organizational grants, and community events such as Runway and Community Connections.

We have much more work to do. We are proud to have funded such a diverse portfolio of students and organizations. We also acknowledge our need to represent diversity in other aspects of our organization, such as board representation and norms around pronouns at our events. In the last year, we have formed a Diversity Committee to formalize our efforts, outlined a 2020 diversity strategy, and set 2020 diversity goals as well. We hope that our rebrand not only better captures the diversity of community and our work thus far but also our commitment to continual improvement.

Ultimately, we share all of this because we know and understand that many members of our community have deep-rooted ties to the GAPA name and brand. We understand this, have heard this in our outreach to community members, and wholeheartedly respect and celebrate our own history as GAPA Foundation and the GAPA community.

That said, we invite you to join us in our ongoing commitment to serve the full spectrum of our API LGBTQIA+ community as the Prism Foundation.

What to expect in 2020

We will continue to serve the API LGBTQIA+ community through scholarships, grants, and community events. From our humble beginnings in 2011 where we gave our very first grant of $250, each year, we have been blessed to give larger amounts of funding thanks to growing support of our mission and work from our donors. In 2019, we were able to give $50,000. As an organization that is completely run by volunteers, we are able to direct a vast majority of these funds directly back into the community, and we intend to continue expanding our reach and capacity-building in coming years.

We will continue to grow our partnerships with API LGBTQIA+ organizations. In the past, we have invited community members to participate in our programs such as our scholarships and grants deliberation committees or as Runway judges. We will continue our partnerships and outreach efforts with other API LGBTQIA+ organizations in order to maintain a connected presence within the community.

We will continue our effort to fully embody the values of diversity and inclusion. As the collective API LGBTQIA+ movement continues to change, transform, and progress, so will we. We are committed to embracing all identities and groups within our API LGBTQIA+ communities and strive for continual improvement. This is a learning process for us, and we are committed to learning and hearing from you.

Last, but not least, thank you.

Thank you to the reader, to our GAPA Foundation family, and to the broader API LGBTQIA+ community for your ongoing support and engagement with our work. We hope that our community members feel excited and enlivened by this decision, and continue to support our work moving forward.

Thank you to the individuals, artists, and organizations acknowledged below who all played a critical role in the rebranding process, whether through direct feedback or ideating logo designs.

Finally, thank you to our generous donor community. As a purely volunteer-run organization, our work is only made possible by your support and dedication. If you would like to join our donor community, please consider giving today and join the movement for change.

Bernie Wong, Vice President & Rebranding Lead
Jonathan Cheung, President
Ty Lim, Co-Founder
—and—
The Prism Foundation Board of Directors

V. With Much Appreciation

Acknowledgements

These individuals played a critical role in our process. We are truly grateful for their support.

Designers

• Dominic Pedruco, www.dompedruco.com

• Duy "Z" Ngo, www.leeduyngoo.wixsite.com

• Gavin Cheng, www.gcheng92.wixsite.com

• Jess Lin, www.beyondthebodyoga.com

• Justine Young, www.justinehyoung.com

• Noah Chang

• Tiffany Lin, www.tlinart.com

GAPA Foundation founding, former, & emeritus board members

• Ben Leong

• Brian Yee

• Felix Tsai

• Sheening Lin 

• Steven Yang

• Tommy Huie 

API LGBTQ+ organization leaders

• Glenn Magpantay, NQAPIA

• Jojo Ty, Lyric

• Kat Evasco, The Future Project

• Lance Toma, San Francisco Community Health Center

• Marsha Aizumi, PFLAG 

• Ralph Leano Atanacio, Cal Q&A

• Rosetta Lai, PFLAG

• Sammie Ablaza Wills, APIENC

• Willy Wilkinson, API TransFusion

In solidarity,