APEX Express is a weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Asian Americans from all corners of our communities. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, djs, and activists and airs each week on KPFA 94.1FM.

APEX Express is committed to building a broader social movement for justice and collective liberation for all oppressed people, including poor & working-class people, people of color, women and queer people. We support grassroots organizing and cultural work that advance these goals, and see APEX as a space for building consciousness and promoting critical discussion about these efforts.

As part of KPFA, we are committed to promoting independent community media that is free and accessible to everyone.

We work collectively to share our skills and resources, and to build the capacity and confidence of community members to tell their own stories. Within our group, we prioritize maintaining a culture of mutual support, respect, and love.

HISTORY
APEX Express was founded in August of 2001. Gina Hotta rallied a small group of folks to start an Asian Pacific Islander radio show on Pacifica Radio Station, KPFA 94.1 FM. In the 1990s she was part of Inside Eastside, the original API show on KPFA.

Gina Hotta, Eric Park, Pratap Chatterjee, Renee Geesler, and Nishat Kurwa worked hard to bring APEX Express to you every week. Through the years, producers came in and out of APEX, yet Gina Hotta stayed strong as the main coordinator for the show.

On September 28, 2009 Gina Hotta passed away of a heart attack. She is our “Mama G,” as we would often call her. She was a mentor for many and a pioneer for making space and airwaves available for at least one hour a week for the voices speaking about Asian American issues and events. Her legacy lives on.

The mission of the Asian Prisoner Support Committee (APSC) is to provide support to Asian & Pacific Islander prisoners and educate the broader community about the growing number of Asians & Pacific Islanders in the United States being imprisoned, detained, and deported. We seek to address and challenge root causes of this crisis such as the deterioration of our educational system, the criminalization of our youth, and the lack of access to resources for low-income immigrants and communities.

The Asian & Pacific Islander (API) prisoner population grew by 250% between 1990 and 2000. In Oakland, CA, several API groups had very high arrest rates, including Samoans (who had the highest arrest rate of any racial/ethnic group in the city, 140 per 1,000), Cambodians (63 per 1,000), Laotians (52 per 1,000) and Vietnamese (28 per 1,000). In the California prison system, APIs are officially categorized as “Others,” a fitting description for a population that is so often overlooked.

Founded in 2002, APSC is based in Oakland and works primarily with inmates at San Quentin and Solano state prisons and the reentry population in Alameda County. APSC is the only organization in the nation with a mission to provide culturally competent services and support specifically for the API incarcerated and formerly incarcerated population.

We’re an SF Bay Area -based, queer + trans people of color crew of artist-activist-healers. We make sassy sexy art to help build a culture of social justice, with an emphasis on healing justice.

We think you’re cute.

OUR PROGRAMS

Peacock Institute for Social Transformation (PIST)
trains QTPOC activists, community organizers, and the cutie down the block as cultural organizers for collective liberation

• Brouhaha: Trans Women of Color Comedy Storytelling 
  a comedy-based storytelling workshop series and show that gets a long-overdue mic to trans women of color activists and mic checks the rest of us
• Brouhaha: QTPOC  Stand-Up Comedy
  a stand-up comedy workshop series and show that’s building a corps of activist-comedians who get positive, life-affirming social justice messages to people who aren’t already at the march or rally
• Rapid Response Safety + Healing Clinics
  free gatherings held after devastating acts of violence such as the PULSE shooting and the election of Trump. free name and gender ID change consults with lawyers, free healing services, art-making and self-defense tools and more
• STAY: An Oakland QTPOC Resilience Festival
  trainings on dance, theater, DJing, meditation, herbal medicine, building community-based safety teams, radical mental health, and more, all for social justice
• Trans Peer Advocacy Training Program
  with support from Transgender Law Center, equips trans fam, primarily trans folks of color, with tools, resources, and a support network to build collective power for trans liberation