Christine Chen

Education and Early Career

Chen attended Ohio State University, where she was president of the undergraduate student government. ³ During her time at Ohio State, Chen helped found the Midwest Asian American Students Union, a nonprofit organization that supports the development of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) student organizations and promotes political activism by AAPI students across the Midwest. ^{3 4}

Chen’s professional activism career began in the mid-1990s, when she became the director of programs for the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA), a non-profit advocacy organization that advocates for the social, political, and economic advancement of AAPIs. ^{5 1} Now formally known as “OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates,” the organization supports several left-of-center policy positions, including removing English proficiency and education level standards for immigration, the elimination of photo identification requirements for voting, and race-based affirmative action in college admissions. ^{1 6}

She also ran the OCA’s College Leadership Program for two years before eventually serving as the organization’s national executive director from 2001 to 2005. ^{5 7}

Chen is the founder of Strategic Alliances USA, a consulting firm with clients including Comcast, the USDA, and Linsanity, a Netflix documentary about Asian-American NBA player Jeremy Lin. ⁸

Elections and Voting Legal Career

From 2006 to 2008, Chen worked as the founding executive director of APIAVote, a project originally developed by OCA in 1996 to increase voting participation among its representative minority groups. ⁹ A $150,000 strategic planning grant from the Ford Foundation in 2004 helped APIAVote spin off from OCA as a separate entity in 2007. ^{10 9}

Under Chen’s leadership, APIAVote partnered with Comcast-Time Warner’s “Our Time to Vote” campaign for the 2008 election cycle and received a grant from the Comcast Foundation to hire staff for communications and voter outreach as part of the cable giant’s “get out the vote” efforts targeting minority voters. ¹¹ The organization also hosted its first presidential town hall event with candidates and their campaign surrogates. ⁹ That election year, APIAVote claimed credit for registering 18,000 new voters, sending mailers to 100,000 AAPI voters, and contacting around 80,000 AAPI households through door knocking and robo-calls. ⁹

After leaving APIAVote for three years, Chen returned to resume the executive director position in 2011. ⁹ In every presidential election year since 2008, APIAVote has hosted a presidential town hall event with candidates and their campaign surrogates. ¹² The organization utilizes its Alliance for Civic Engagement network across 28 states to conduct grassroots voter contact and engagement programs through phone banking, targeted mail, door-to-door canvassing, and media advertising. ¹³

In 2020, Chen was the national coordinator of the APIAVote Presidential Town Hall that featured then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Trump campaign surrogate Eddie Baza Calvo, the former governor of Guam. ¹⁴

According to APIAVote’s 2019 tax returns, Chen received an annual salary of $120,000 in compensation for her role as executive director. ¹⁵

Political Views and Associations

Chen has publicly advocated for left-of-center policy positions including support for initiatives to expand online voter registration and implement automatic voter registration policies. ¹⁶ She has also claimed Asian Americans favor affirmative-action policies and the incorporation of “diverse viewpoints” in education curriculums. ¹⁷

Chen has held board positions for many left-of-center non-profit organizations. ⁷ These include Demos, is a New York City-based think tank associated with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) which has endorsed the Green New Deal; the Gates Millennium Scholars Program, which provides race-based college tuition assistance; ¹⁸ and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which opposes identification requirements for voters who register by mail. ¹⁹

Chen is a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises, an advocacy organization that called for the removal of President Donald Trump from office after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021 and supported “wide-scale voting by mail” in the 2020 presidential election. ^{20 21 2}

Chen is a Leading from the Inside Out (LIO) fellow of the Social Transformation Project, a training initiative of the Rockwood Leadership Institute that calls for “multi-racial feminist democracy” as a mission goal. ^{22 23 24}