Bethany Li

Commissioner

Bethany Li has used a movement lawyering model to fight for social justice in Asian American communities and advance racial equity. Using an innovative and multi-faceted approach in collaboration with community organizers, Bethany has litigated cases and led advocacy work on a range of civil rights issues, including housing and displacement, workers’ rights, immigration, education equity, language access, and hate crimes. Bethany represented Southeast Asian communities fighting against deportation, including the first Cambodian American to return to the East Coast after deportation. In collaboration with community organizers, she co-produced the documentary “Keep Saray Home” about Southeast Asian families fighting deportations. She served as co-counsel to a multi-racial coalition of organizations and families intervening in a lawsuit in support of Boston Public Schools’ shift in exam policy. Bethany has won millions in back wages for low-wage workers along the Northeast corridor. She has led a variety of initiatives to increase low-income and limited- English proficient Asian Americans’ access to resources. She also published a report documenting the gentrification of Chinatowns on the East Coast and guided the launch of RAISE, the first undocumented Asian American youth group on the East Coast. Bethany started her legal career at AALDEF as an Equal Justice Works Fellow and staff attorney. She then taught and supervised cases in Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic as the Robert M. Cover Fellow. Bethany was also the Director of the Asian Outreach Unit at Greater Boston Legal Services. Bethany taught as an adjunct professor at Hunter College on Asian American civil rights and the law. Bethany graduated from Georgetown University Law Center and Amherst College. She serves on Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court Standing Committee on Well Being and the Massachusetts Governor’s Task Force for Hate Crimes.

Christopher Huang

Commissioner

Christopher Huang is a photographer and videographer with extensive experience in creating impactful visual narratives. He works with artists, public figures, leaders, companies, C-level executives, entrepreneurs, educators, politicians, performers, organizations, and students, among others, capturing their stories.

Christopher grew up knowing how frustrating and harmful it is to have Asian and Asian American stories told inaccurately, in a dehumanizing manner, by a media and entertainment industry that is white male dominated. Experiencing this developed his empathy for other marginalized and dehumanized people, and motivated him to tell these stories responsibly and accurately with a meticulous eye for detail. Those experiences have motivated him to continue creating cross-cultural bridges between communities.

Some of his career highlights include being hired to photograph some of the Asian American public media figures who helped inspire him to pursue a creative path. He is especially proud of inspiring younger POC storytellers to take control of their own narrative.

Christopher also gives keynotes and leads workshops on creating more empathetic and effective leadership with body language, both at the interpersonal and marketing level of the organization, promoting a culture that stresses equity, inclusion, and belonging. Even among those who do the basic step of talking about the importance of DEIB and show images with “diversity” in their organization’s branding, which is not as common as it should be, there is often a glaring disconnect in what they say and write compared to what they convey in body language.

His work can be seen at christopherhuang.com

Amy Goh

Commissioner

Amy Goh (she/her) is as a Certified Nurse-Midwife and PhD candidate. She is also Adjunct Faculty at Thomas Jefferson University’s Midwifery program. As a child of immigrants from South Korea, her decade long career as a midwife in the Boston area has focused on providing quality midwifery care for immigrant communities and communities of color. Most recently she received a grant to undertake an analysis of Asian American birth outcomes from the American Association of Birth Centers’ Perinatal Data Registry. Previous to her midwifery career, Amy worked to improve and better understand the complexities of health and rights in global communities. After her stint as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cape Verde, she completed her MPhil thesis in International Development on the socio-political aspects of maternal mortality in Brazil. Amy is a Fellow of the American College of Nurse-Midwives and is on the Board of Directors of the American Association of Birth Centers. She was a former Health Equity Fellow through Cambridge Health Alliance’s Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy and a previous Duke-Johnson and Johnson Nurse Leadership Fellow.

Leo L. Hwang, Ph.D

Commissioner

Dr. Leo L. Hwang is the Assistant Academic Dean in the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Dr. Hwang is particularly interested in using participatory action research and asset based community development as a model for enhancing how we engage in racial justice work in higher education. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts in Geosciences, an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his B.A. in English and Fine Arts from the University of the South.

His work has appeared in The Racial Equity & Justice Institute Practitioner Handbook, The Handbook of Diverse Economies, Human Being & Literature, The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Travel and Tourism, Route Nine, Rethinking Marxism, Solidarity Economy I: Building Alternatives for People and Planet, Meat for Tea, The Massachusetts Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Rivendell, Fiction, Gulf Coast and other journals and publications. He has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Mount Holyoke College; Greenfield Community College; and Westfield State University; and he served as Dean of Humanities, Engineering, Math, and Science at Greenfield Community College.