NAASCon 2004 @ USC

WARREN FURUTANI
Warren Furutani was elected to the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees in 1999. He is the only person ever to be elected to both the Los Angeles Unified Board of Education and the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees.

A native Californian and fourth generation Japanese American, Mr. Furutani is a product of the Los Angeles public education system. He attended schools in the '50s and '60s graduating from Gardena High School in 1965. He then attended several community colleges including Los Angeles City College, El Camino College, and the College of San Mateo in the San Francisco Bay area. He graduated from Antioch University with a liberal arts degree.

Warren has always been a staunch advocate for equal opportunity especially as it relates to education. An activist starting in the '60s, he worked to establish admissions programs for students of color at colleges and universities throughout the United States. He also worked tirelessly to establish ethnic studies programs and departments at these same campuses.

Interviews with Mr. Furutani from that era were published in UCLA's Asian American Studies Center's first edition of its academic journal, Amerasia Journal (Vol. One, Number One). Another interview is published in the Center's first Asian American textbook entitled, "Roots: An Asian American Reader." Since then, Furutani has also had his writings published in these same journals and he served on the staff of the Center in the '80s. (Warren's activism from those days is further documented in the Japanese American National Museum's exhibit "Common Ground.")

Warren Furutani was first elected to the Los Angeles Unified Board of Education in 1987. He was the first Asian Pacific American ever to be elected to the Board. In 1991 he was re-elected and served as the Board's president. He is noted for helping open up the school district to more concrete parental, community, teacher and staff involvement in the education system.

Since leaving the Board, Mr. Furutani has served as the executive director of the Asian Pacific Community Fund, a philanthropic organization and as the president and CEO of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON), an umbrella organization comprised of more than 50 human service organizations serving the greater Los Angeles area.

Concurrently, Mr. Furutani holds the position of Assistant to the Speaker, California Assembly Speaker, Herb Wesson.

ANGELA E. OH, J.D.
Angela E. Oh has been teaching, writing and lecturing on the subject of race and human relations for more than a decade. Her area of law practice was criminal defense, representing clients in matters before the state and federal courts.

She currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors for Lawyers Mutual Insurance Company, Women's Policy, Inc., and the Korean American Bar Association of Southern California. Ms. Oh recently finished a collection of essays about the people she has met and the experiences she has had in a book published by the Asian American Studies Department of UCLA - "Open: One Woman's Journey."

Emerging as a voice of reconciliation in 1992, and having served on the seven-member Advisory Board to President Clinton's Initiative on Race, Ms. Oh brings a combination of organizational, community, and political insight to the opportunities and challenges of diversity and change.

Ms. Oh's university appointments have been as Lawyer in Residence at UCLA's School of Law, Lecturer at UCLA's Asian American Studies Department, and Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine's School of Social Sciences. She is a graduate of UCLA, where she earned her BA in Psychology and Masters in Public Health. Her Juris Doctorate is from UC Davis

GLENN OMATSU
Glenn Omatsu is a Lecturer in Asian American Studies and the Educational Opportunity Program at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and also teaches classes at Pasadena City College and UCLA. He is co-editor (with Steve Louie) of Asian Americans: The Movement and Moment and co-editor (with Edith Chen) of the forthcoming book Teaching about Asian Pacific Americans. He also has written articles on Freedom Schooling, immigrant labor campaigns, and other social movements for justice. At UCLA, he previously served as associate editor of Amerasia Journal, the nation's only interdisciplinary research publication in Asian American Studies.

He is active with community and labor groups and solidarity networks. He has worked with a number of interethnic alliances in Los Angeles, including the New Otani workers' support committee, the Koreatown restaurant workers' support committee, and the Koreatown market workers' support committee.

TAZ AHMED
Tanzila "Taz" Ahmed is the founder and Director for South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY) and runs around the country doing speaking engagements, training South Asian youth in organizing, and supervising campus fellows on the Vote SAAVY Campaign.

At the youthful age of 25 yrs., she has been an organizer in the youth voting movement for the past 6 years. She used to live in DC and work for EnviroCitizen, where she trained over 400 youth, but was upset by the lack of brown faces in her trainings. So she started talking with other like-minded Desis about this need, and thus, founded SAAVY fall of 2003. SAAVY has trained over 300 young South Asians, and is mobilizing hundreds of the South Asians to the polls this fall.

Taz was also featured as an author for "Storming the Polls: How to Vote Your Views and Change the Rules." Taz graduated from the University of Southern California in 2001 with an Environmental Studies degree, and lives currently in the Los Angeles area, working on registering and training youth voters, and mobilizing the APA/SA community of Southern California.