by Kimmy Lee
Northwest Asia Weekly
Tianna Andresen wears a bucket hat she designed for Barkada Baby. (Photo via Tiana Anderson)
Young Asian small business owners and creatives gathered at the Asia Counseling and Referral Service (ACRS) youth forum event Pass the Mic in early February to discuss with other youth present how they can use their creative channels to advance social justice in their communities.
Organized by the Civic Engagement Youth Organization team, the event serves as a space open to all King County youth to express their ideas and discuss important issues and changes they would like to see as a collective community.
“Protesting and lobbying are super effective forms of civic engagement, but so is creativity, right?” ACRS youth team member Mimi To said. “The intent behind Pass the Mic is to show that activism doesn’t take a form.”
Student speakers are invited to the event to share their own experiences and to encourage other youth to start advocacy using their own platforms and creative media.
Tianna Andresen, 22, was one of the featured small business owners at the event. She is a full-time student at the University of Washington (UW) and owner of Barkada Baby, a fashion business that sells bucket hats and stickers.
Barkada Baby started out as Andresen’s Instagram page for her visual arts, fashion design, spoken poetry, writing and school projects. During the pandemic, she used it as a platform, separate from her personal Instagram, to connect with others through art.
“From the beginning, I wanted to create a space for particularly marginalized communities to come together and connect around art,” Anderson said.
As her page started to receive more attention from family and friends, they encouraged her to make stickers out of the prints she designed. After early success, she began to dabble more in fashion design, and her page turned into a small business.
Maria Macatbag, 22, another student business owner and a senior at the University of Wisconsin, uses her creativity as a way to celebrate Filipino identity while raising money for Filipino community organizations. Macatbag also started her jewelry business, AwawAwawCo, during the start of the pandemic.
Macatbag said she wanted to be different and have design products that represented her.
“I wanted to show it as an everyday perspective of my life, my identity, and hopefully someone who sees my product will resonate with it in some way,” Macatbag said.
Each of her designs has a story or symbolism based on her life in the Philippines and the community in which she grew up in the United States. Her first earrings featured the sun and three-star symbols, representing the Philippine flag symbol and part of her identity.
With the profits she makes from her online business, she donates to Philippine nonprofits and mutual aid organizations.
Macatbag said the platforms are a way that creatives and local business owners can share their experiences to serve the community.
“The second way to support the community is to be a mentor, sort of a speaker for cutting-edge runners,” Macatbag said. “There are young creatives who want to get into the field and offer advice and tips on how they can thrive and grow.”
Through civic engagement and community organizing events such as the Pass the Mic event, the ACRS Youth Team hopes to bring together a community of empowered youth, using their voices and platforms to advocate for issues they are passionate about.
At the event, they discussed how students can engage in social justice work in both traditional and non-traditional civic engagement.
“We were just supporting ACRS priorities at the time, as the ACRS Civic Engagement team provided youth team members with the tools, knowledge and empowerment to launch our own community projects,” To said. “Getting Asian-American and immigrant families to register to vote in the fall is important because they are historically excluded and only recently had a legislative session. But it’s a free-flowing process, and we’re learning as we go.”
Some youth team work includes encouraging political participation, such as attending virtual lobbying sessions and participating in political demonstrations.
To said the inspiration behind the campaign was to create an educational space to teach people about advocacy and ACRS’ legislative priorities, including lobbying, immigrant employment, accessible healthcare and housing.
Students learn how to get involved in social work, including researching where their money goes, how the school allocates funds and ways to support mutual aid organizations.
They also discussed how to expand social justice work to include non-traditional approaches, including creative mediums. This includes writing essays and thinking pieces, or making jewelry, stickers, and clothing to raise money for a cause—all of which are different acts of resistance to systemic oppression.
“We wanted to create a space to unravel it and make activism and civic engagement more accessible and understandable to youth,” To said. “We also wanted it to be fun, including raffle prizes from local businesses and creatives to challenge the notion that marginalized people must continually re-experiencing our pain and oppression in order to do social justice work, rather than celebrating our existence as resistance .”
Throughout the event, participants ran a sweepstakes as a way to encourage them to contribute to the community in creative ways, not just through traditional political participation.
Participants and student speakers also had the opportunity to reflect on their own activism journeys, what they wanted to know more about, and how they would apply what they learned to their own lives.
Andresen said she hopes to host some kind of fundraiser or mutual aid event when she gets a larger platform to give back to the community. From the beginning, her motto for Barkada Baby has been “Community Made, Community Gives”.
“Barkada Baby may be small as a brand, but the spirit of Barkada is anything but,” Andreessen said in her recent Instagram post. “I want Barkada Baby to grow and become something that helps our collective life, or at least reminds people how important their presence is to our collective life.”
The word Barkada is Tagalog slang for a group of friends and has a special meaning for Andreessen.
“It was introduced to me by a group of Filipino friends and when we saw each other we could just walk up and down the hall and say ‘Baccada boys’ as a greeting and a reminder that we have community with each other ,” Anderson said.
As she began to become more involved in social justice and education, the word “Barkada” changed for her and became more of a word to describe community.
“Toni Cade Bambara quotes this quote, ‘The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible,'” Anderson said. “It’s something that’s very close to me and something that I want to use for Barkada Baby, so continue to create educational art for others, something that happens differently within my community, but also elevates other marginalized in the process group.”
Kimmy can be contacted by: info@nwasianweekly.com.
