The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP) is the largest membership organization of asylum seekers in history. Through ASAP’s participatory model, 600,000+ members have set collective priorities, pursued lawsuits, and led advocacy campaigns. And they have won—securing work permits for hundreds of thousands of immigrants! ASAP believes solutions will often have the highest impact when they are designed by the highly impacted. In this talk, Swapna Reddy, co-founder and Co-Executive Director of ASAP, will discuss opportunities, challenges, and lessons learned from engaging with a large member base to achieve meaningful change. Swapna will share concrete examples of how ASAP has engaged in participatory decision-making and collective action at scale.
Swapna Reddy is a co-founder and Co-Executive Director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP). ASAP is a membership-based organization comprised of more than 600,000 asylum seekers from 175+ countries now living in all 50 U.S. states. ASAP works alongside its members to build a more humane asylum system in the United States.
Swapna has a background in artificial intelligence and empirical research. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Mathematics and minor in Economics. A John Harvard Scholar, her senior thesis research was published in Artificial Intelligence. She has experience conducting technical research for the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Indianapolis Colts, and TERC, an educational research nonprofit.
Swapna is also a lawyer. She earned her law degree from Yale Law School, where she co-founded ASAP along with three others. She gained experience providing civil rights and immigration legal services at the National Immigrant Justice Center, Brooklyn Defender Services, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, Ross Silverman LLP, and Yale’s Worker & Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic.
Swapna is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and grew up in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Her work with ASAP has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Today Show, among other sources, and has won the support of an Ashoka fellowship, an Echoing Green fellowship, an Equal Justice Works Emerson fellowship, and the J.M.K. Innovation Prize.