About Us
Founded in 2016, TAPAS is a nonhierarchical, student-driven organization where advocacy, scholarship, and community intersect. We create space for students to explore ideas, organize around shared concerns in the Asian American community, and support one another in the process. Over time, TAPAS has become not just a space for organizing, but a community grounded in care, trust, and lasting connection.
TAPAS History
The following timeline highlights TAPAS’s evolution from its founding to significant name changes, initiatives, and structural shifts that have shaped the organization today.
Fall 2019 — Adoption of Committee Based Structure
In Fall 2019, TAPAS moved closer to this vision when it adopted a committee based structure wherein members form working groups directed towards a specific task at will and exercise great autonomy in directing action within those groups. This structure not only greatly flattened the organization’s hierarchy, it also led to a broadening of club activities. While prior to this change TAPAS primarily focused on Ethnic Studies organizing, this change saw a broadening of topics explored, and a shift in focus for the club. A few months later, popular ethnic studies scholar Professor García Peña was denied tenure, sparking campus-wide protests and a revitalization of the Harvard Ethnic Studies Coalition (HESC). Wherein HESC was largely made up of TAPAS members before this event, HESC came to include many more students and took on a life of its own outside TAPAS.
Today
Today, TAPAS coordinates activities to promote a variety of progressive causes. In recent years, our work has included engagement around the Harvard v. SFFA 2023 affirmative action case, research presentations at conferences on Asian American fields, collaborative community projects such as member-created cookbooks, solidarity actions with movements from Hong Kong to Mauna Kea, and panels on issues such as Southeast Asian American deportations. TAPAS remains a nonhierarchical, student-driven collective that meets weekly and welcomes all students to participate.
April 2016 — Founding of TAPAS
TAPAS was founded in April 2016 to promote Asian and Pacific American Studies. Over the next few years, some members joined TAPAS because of an interest in broader progressive advocacy. They ran events tackling Asian American progressive issues ond the academic realm — reflecting the belief that ethnic studies knowledge should be applied to community-based work — and began to urge that TAPAS officially expand its scope and become an Asian American progressive space, a role that no organization officially fulfilled at the time.
April 2020 — Renaming of TAPAS
Following the internal change to TAPAS’s structure and a broadening of activities after the founding of HESC, many more in the organization began to question whether the club’s original name, “Task Force on Asian and Pacific American Studies,” still functioned as an accurate label of the club. After a two week voting period, “Task Force for Asian American Progressive Advocacy and Studies” garnered 11/19 first-choice votes in a ranked choice voting format, and was formally adopted as the organization’s name on April 28th, 2020.