Asian Women’s Shelter and the Work of Community-Based Support — Interview with Orchid Pusey (1)

Founding Asian Women’s Shelter: Making a Place for Those Left Out

🧶 Kyeol : Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with Kyeol today. To start, could you introduce the Asian Women’s Shelter to our readers and share its mission and vision?

🧶 Orchid Pusey : Hello, I am Orchid Pusey, Executive Director at the Asian Women’s Shelter (AWS from now on). AWS started in San Francisco in 1988, and our mission is to eliminate domestic violence by promoting the social, political, and economic self-determination of women and of all survivors of violence and oppression.

Our vision is a world where everyone has the right and the real options to live their own life safely. We began with a crisis line and emergency shelter, and that remains at the fore of our work, but we have grown into much more over time.

🧶 Kyeol : Could you tell us how the organization started? Why did the founders focus specifically on Asian women?

🧶 Orchid Pusey : AWS was founded by an amazing group of Asian women who saw a real gap in the domestic violence field.^[1] Our founding executive director, Beckie, had worked at a domestic violence program in the Bay Area, where there was a large Asian immigrant and refugee population. But there were no Asian callers on the crisis line, no Asian residents in the shelter, and no Asian volunteers. She was the only Asian staff member. So she realized, “People aren't coming here because they don't think they can." That became the starting point. The founders wanted to create a program that centered Asian immigrant women’s experiences—in staffing, outreach, volunteer recruitment, language access, and program design. People needed to know that this place is different. You can come here, and speak in your own language.

Language access was always a basic need for us. If you’re worried about your life, your children, or elderly parents at home, you need someone to talk to and somewhere to go. At that time, if you didn’t speak English, there were very few options. And before the Violence Against Women Act, immigrant survivors had almost no way to continue the immigration process if the person abusing them was also their sponsor.

So in the beginning, the focus was on immediate needs: safety, legal support, divorce, custody, and family support. But when it came to immigration, for the first six years, there was very little people could do.

🧶 Kyeol : How have those needs remained the same or changed over the years?

🧶 Orchid Pusey : In many ways, the basic needs are still the same. Domestic violence continues because the conditions that support it run very deep. They are not easy to transform.

Sometimes I think about foot-binding in China. It continued for about a thousand years, and then changed within about a hundred years, within a few generations. So I do think change is possible. But ending one practice does not mean women’s oppression disappears.

With domestic violence, some rights and resources have changed, but many needs remain the same. Women are still often raised to be financial followers rather than financial leaders. There is still an assumption that a man will be the main earner and manage the family finances. So survivors still need access to employment, affordable childcare, job training, and workplace readiness. And those programs need to be available in different languages, but often they are not. The issues are all interconnected. Housing, economic development, and economic independence—those were needs when we started, and they are still needs today.

Violence Against Women in War and Peace

🧶 Kyeol : Your point that violence against women runs deep also resonates with Kyeol’s mission. Kyeol began as a platform addressing the “Comfort Women” issue and has since expanded its focus to broader questions of gender-based violence and human rights. Do you see connections between this history and AWS’s mission today?

🧶 Orchid Pusey : Totally, I do. And I’m really glad that Kyeol exists and that this was your starting point.

Socially and politically, I think violence against women in war and occupation is deeply connected to violence against women in times of peace. They cannot really be separated. At the core, women are often not treated as equal adults. They are not given the same respect, autonomy, or control over their own bodies and futures. That structure exists both in war and in everyday life. Women are often expected to be in service to men, and sexual violence and abuse—whether in domestic violence or in wartime—are often suppressed, denied, or not talked about. That denial happens at every level, from the individual to the nation-state.

I also think women are expected to carry the burden of honor and secrecy for everyone else, even when they are the ones being harmed. In many immigrant communities, women are also expected to carry cultural identity—how they cook, dress, behave, and represent the family or community. So their responsibility is everything, but their authority is very limited.

And when a woman is seen as “dishonored,” people often care more about what that means for the family or community than what it means for her. But there is nothing natural about it. It is a culturally made system, and because it was made, it can also be changed.

🧶 Kyeol : I strongly agree with your point about denial happens at every level. Survivors of sexual violence, including “Comfort Women” survivors, have often been pressured not to speak about their experiences. In that sense, raising awareness seems important both for supporting survivors and changing society. How does AWS promote its services and its broader mission?

🧶 Orchid Pusey : I think of our founders when I think about this question. Domestic violence is less stigmatized now than it was in the 1980s, but it is still stigmatized. So we want information to be available to as many people as possible, without requiring them to work too hard to find it—or to say something out loud first.

From early on, we built relationships with community organizations and small businesses and asked them to share our information. Sometimes people might reject you. They might say, “This is too negative,” or “You’re giving our community a bad name.” But at least you tried, and that moment puts the issue in front of someone’s face.

We put our information in churches, grocery stores, libraries, health clinics—anywhere people naturally go. We also try to be known as a kind, dependable group of people. Survivors might not call us first. They may first talk to a family member, a trusted friend, someone at a religious institution, or another parent at school. So we need to show up in the places where survivors already are. Now we also have online resources, so people can find us and safely exit the site if needed.

From Emergency Shelter to Lasting Stability

🧶 Kyeol : From this broader connection between historical and present-day gender-based violence, I’d like to turn to AWS’s concrete work with survivors. How do you support them?

🧶 Orchid Pusey : Let me start with our shelter services for survivors of domestic violence.

When survivors of domestic violence need to leave home, they can call us and move into our shelter. We try to make it feel as much like home as possible. It is not like a homeless shelter where people only stay at night. They live there. They live there with their children, including children of any gender or age, and sometimes dependent adult children. Some survivors are pregnant, and some have their babies while staying with us. They cook what they want and continue living their lives. They may be working, looking for jobs or housing, handling legal matters, and doing all the things they need to do. Of course, it can never be their real home, but we try to make it a place where they feel they belong and can have some physical and emotional safety.

We also support survivors through transitional housing. We use a scattered-site model, so we help people find housing, get into a lease, and maintain it. For many, it is their first lease on their own. We then provide rental assistance for about 18 months, with the goal of helping them keep housing as their permanent home.

🧶 Kyeol : After survivors find jobs or move into more permanent housing, do you continue to stay in touch with them?

🧶 Orchid Pusey : Yes, we do both follow-up and catch-up. Legal processes often take years, so we may stay in touch about court cases or housing issues for a long time.

We also hold a big Lunar New Year party every year and invite both former and current clients. It feels like our annual reunion. We eat together, celebrate, and have activities for the kids, and just try to be happy together. We get to see children we first met as babies graduate from high school. That makes us really happy and rewarded.

We want people to associate Asian Women’s Shelter—and even the experience of being a survivor—with something positive and celebratory. Something to feel proud of, not something to hide or leave in the past.

Language as the Start of Everything

🧶 Kyeol : Earlier, you mentioned that language access is a basic need for AWS’s work. Could you explain your language-accessible services?

🧶 Orchid Pusey : Language is everything. It is how you get to exist outside of your own head. Being understood by someone else is such a core part of being human. If you are trapped and cannot explain what is happening to you, your sense of yourself and your life gets smaller. And when trauma is involved, it becomes even more serious. The people who need to understand you may be making decisions about your life and your children’s lives—your attorney, the police, the court, the shelter, and the systems around you. So language is the start of everything. That is why AWS started its multilingual access model very early. You cannot be an Asian-serving organization and not address language access right away.

🧶 Kyeol : AWS serves survivors from many different language communities. How do you manage that range of languages?

🧶 Orchid Pusey : We knew right away that we could never represent every community only through staff. Asia is too huge and diverse for that. So we wanted staff to speak as many languages as possible, but we also needed another level where community members could join the work. That became our multilingual access model.

I love this model because it gives me hope. There are people in every community who want violence to stop, who want children to have peaceful childhoods, and who want every adult in the household to have a voice.

The model helps us find those people: speakers of Mongolian, Vietnamese, Arabic, Indian languages, and languages from smaller refugee communities. Our first advocate spoke Mien, a smaller ethnic community language.^[2] It was hard to find, but the community was here, and people needed it. Central Asian languages are still hard for us, but we will keep working on it forever.

🧶 Kyeol : What does this model mean beyond translation itself?

🧶 Orchid Pusey : Our language advocates receive training, and that makes their own communities stronger. Even if someone in their community never calls us, they may still get better support because we invested in that advocate.

🧶 Orchid Pusey : Our language advocates receive training, and that makes their own communities stronger. Even if someone in their community never calls us, they may still get better support because we invested in that advocate.

Our 30 staff members speak about 20 languages. Through the multilingual access model, we can reach more than 40 languages. These advocates have their own lives and responsibilities, but they can still be called upon when needed. I think of them almost like secret agents—ready in as many communities as possible.

When someone is trying to control a survivor, especially someone socially marginalized, it is easy to say, “No one will support you. Your whole community will blame you.” And survivors may believe that. That is why we need volunteers, language advocates, and staff from the community. We give the opposite message: “There are people in your community who support you. They want you to have your own life. They are not judging you.” The language strength is obvious, but there is also representational strength. It directly challenges what survivors have been told.

“Not Either/Or, But All”: Serving Diverse Communities

🧶 Kyeol : AWS has worked with many different communities, including immigrant and refugee women, children, queer people, youth, and Arab communities.^[3] How do you approach serving these communities in ways that reflect their specific needs?

🧶 Orchid Pusey : One thing I love about AWS is that we believe in “not either/or, but all.” Many immigrant and refugee survivors live every day knowing they are not part of the dominant norm. So they may not call a program unless they see themselves named in some way. They may think, “Nobody there will speak my language. They won’t know where I’m from. They won’t understand my culture.”

That can be true for many survivors: someone with limited English, an LGBTQ+^[4] survivor, a deaf or hard-of-hearing survivor, or someone who uses the sign language of their own community, not American Sign Language. Whoever the survivor is, they need to know there is real capacity to support them.

So for us, it’s about making sure people have good options. That means culturally specific services where people feel like we were waiting for them, not trying to fit them into something that wasn’t made for them.

We also tell people: you do not have to know what you want to do. You do not have to want to leave. You can just be exploring information, venting, or look for emotional support. We want fewer situations where someone loses their life without ever having the chance to get support.

🧶 Kyeol : Why has it been important for AWS to create specific programs?

🧶 Orchid Pusey : We need culturally specific places where people feel understood and where they feel they belong. But we also don’t want other programs to say, “If they’re Asian, send them to Asian Women’s Shelter.” We need both: culturally specific programs, and broader systems that keep improving their own accessibility.

We think about this internally, too. We could have said, “We created Asian Women’s Shelter. We have Asian staff, multiple languages, a shelter, and a crisis line. We’re done.” But then we would be like any other organization that only looks out for the largest group. There is always a smaller group that is hidden, forgotten, or afraid they won’t be accepted.

That is why we started the Queer Asian Women and Transgender Support Program in the early 1990s. We knew LGBTQ people in our communities might think, “If there is no program named for us, maybe this place is not for us.” Arab Women Services^[5] came from a similar place. We also have community-specific programs, including K-PEACE program,^[6] which focuses on Korean communities, and our youth program.

But having a special program does not mean the rest of the organization does nothing. We want the whole organization to genuinely support LGBTQ survivors, not just one program. So we build that into volunteer training, crisis line training, and the way we think about the shelter itself. If the shelter is going to be a home for people of different languages, countries, sexual orientations, and relationships, we have to keep working on that.

So inside and outside the organization, we try to do both: create specific programs and build broader accessibility for everyone.