Our Team
Executive Director / Co-Founder
Sasanna Yee
Sasanna Yee, born and raised in San Francisco, is a bilingual (Cantonese and English) trauma-informed yoga teacher who is passionate about healing and wholeness on all levels. Her own yogic journey began over 10 years ago when she was looking to ease chronic pain and mental health challenges. She has found it possible to experience more peace, joy and freedom in mind, body, spirit, and community. Sasanna not only sees but feels the connection between an individual’s pain and the pain of a community. It is the same. She received formal training from Niroga Institute in Oakland, CA and Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center in India. She teaches yoga through the lens of access providing therapeutic support to underserved and underrepresented communities such as at-risk and immigrant populations. By giving people the tools to connect deeper with themselves and each other, Sasanna firmly believes we can heal core wounds, build resilience and transform lives. The ripples are infinite.
Movement Director
Sally chang
Sally Chang, martial artist, educator, acupuncturist, and founder of Evergreen Taiji Academy. Teaching online and in-person, integrating 30 years of Martial Arts experience, Taoist cultivation, and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), distilling them into practices of individual and collective healing. Sally Chang delivers depth and wisdom into embodied practice, and is known for her warm, focused presence.
Culture Director
Forest Lin
Forest Lin is a queer, gender-expansive 1.5 generation Taiwanese-American facilitator and community organizer. They weave together various Asian diasporic spaces focused on ancestral healing and social change, including Asian Healers for Liberation and Asian Refugees United. As the Culture Director of Communities As One, Forest empowers Asian individuals to foster belonging and vitality.
A practitioner of Chinese Astrology, BTB Feng Shui, and Eastern Ashiatsu, Forest helps others align with their values and natural rhythms. Guided by the principles of transformation, community healing, and solidarity, they envision a world where everyone feels a sense of connection, safety, and ease within their communities.
Our Board
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Tina Wong
Tina C. Wong is a veteran professional helping residents of the Bay Area get their first homes and homes suitable for their growing needs. Tina is passionate about helping communities in their upward mobility by achieving their American Dream. Tina believes that all communities can learn from and support each other. By dedicating her financial know-how as the treasurer of Communities as One, she gives back to the people she cares deeply about.
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Josephine Zhao
Josephine Zhao is a long-time community advocate and a decade old educator. She is passionate in increasing community engagement and breaking down stereotypes using her trilingual language skills. She found that when the language barrier is removed, people are saying the same things about what they are grateful for and what they desire. Bringing communities together as ONE will make our world a better place.
Our Partners
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The Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence is a culturally specific national resource center on domestic violence, sexual violence, trafficking, and other forms of gender-based violence in Asian/Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. We envision a world free of gender-based violence for communities with equal opportunities for all to thrive.
Our mission is to disrupt gender-based violence, which causes physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual and economic harm within AAPI communities throughout the U.S. and its territories.Item description
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Ai Acupuncture serves the Bay Area, California providing wellness treatments based in East Asian medicine. We provide one-on-one and group treatments, using a variety of therapeutic modalities to address both individual and collective concerns and needs. We use a holistic approach, with the goal of bringing balance to the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical parts of ourselves, as they are all interrelated. By incorporating the ancient wisdom of our ancestors, Ai Acupuncture aims to help improve health and well-being within our communities and beyond.
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Banteay Srei is a youth development, asset building organization that is nonjudgmental of young Southeast Asian women who are at risk, or being exploited by the sex trade. We seek to provide the resources that support their healthy development through self-empowerment and self-determination.
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The Chinese Medicine & Magic group is a gathering of people in the SF Bay Area connecting with the medicine, magic and earth based ways of knowing of our Chinese cultural heritage. Medicine is defined broadly and can include community, stories, plant medicine, activism and solidarity, qi gong, astrology, movement practices, feng shui, daoism, cooking, gardening and farming, arts/art making, and much more.
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Evergreen Taiji Academy is a practice community dedicated to the cultivation of Taiji and Qigong from a Taoist perspective. Guiding students through multi-dimensional practice of meditation in motion, to generate structural and energetic integrity.
Our whole health approach integrates Martial Arts, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and Daoist Wisdom Arts. Awakening our innate capacity to heal and regenerate. Taiji and Qigong require focus, perseverance, and heart. Daoist practice is a way of living that nurtures authenticity, integrity, and freedom by being in dynamic balance with nature.
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The Guam Coalition Against Sexual Assault & Family Violence (GCASAFV) is a nonprofit organization that collaborates with other service providers, government allies, and community individuals who address sexual assault and family violence issues in Guam. GCASAFV’S mission aligns with its purposes and focuses on fostering safe, healthy, violence-free communities.
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Moving Rasa supports people to boldly explore life through movement improvisation within the contexts of socio-political realities, the physical environment, interpersonal relationships, and their internal worlds. These journeys are facilitated with the trauma informed movement form also named Moving Rasa. Since 2015, we have worked with several populations and organizations and focus on BIPOC across age, ability and gender. Rasa, the Indonesian word for essence, describes this Southeast Asian American Somatic form that weaves together Western somatics with indigenous Indonesian philosophy. Moving Rasa lives at the nexus of movement, awareness, emotional wellbeing and healing; transforming oppression individually and collectively.
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The National Organization of Asians and Pacific Islanders Ending Sexual Violence (NAPIESV) is a program under Monsoon Asians & Pacific Islanders in Solidarity, with a mission to support local and international community-based programs and governmental organizations in enhancing their services to victims of sexual violence from the Asian and Pacific Islander communities in the U.S., U.S. Territories in the Pacific, and Asia. Monsoon Asians & Pacific Islanders in Solidarity is a community-based organization with a mission to end violence against women in the Asians & Pacific Islanders communities in Iowa.
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The New Breath Foundation (NBF) offers hope, healing, and new beginnings for Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) new immigrants and refugees, people impacted by incarceration and deportation, and survivors of violence. NBF is leading the movement to fund grassroots groups that transform AANHPI lives in the here and now while fighting for the collective liberation of all people of color.
NBF was founded in 2017 by Eddy Zheng, the first formerly incarcerated “juvenile lifer” to serve as Founder and President of a philanthropic Foundation. Eddy, who experienced the “school to prison to deportation pipeline,” has committed his life to addressing issues of trauma, stigma, and shame in the AAPI community for decades. NBF grew out of the grassroots movements to end mass incarceration, address immigration/deportation issues, and advance racial justice and solidarity. NBF staff and board members have spent decades organizing around these issues, with expertise in community organizing, fundraising, non-profit governance, philanthropy, and leadership development.
