What Happened to WAESN? Some History.

WAESN History; Cliff Notes Style

WAESN started in 2019 as a loosely organized network of educators in Western Washington who were practicing, or interested in practicing, Ethnic Studies in their K–12 classrooms. We decided to officially incorporate as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit in the spring of 2020 because we believed that an official structure would provide a sense of legitimacy.

Since we were all educators, we had no idea what we were doing and quickly learned that philanthropists rarely award grants to 501(c)(4) organizations because they are considered “too political.” In 2021, we also founded a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Together, these two entities are collectively known as Washington Ethnic Studies Now (WAESN).

In the formative years, WAESN sustained itself entirely through contracts with schools and districts along the I-5 Corridor, with a few partnerships out of state. The year 2020 marked a national reckoning; an outcry against police violence and a call for anti-racist education in classrooms. However, by fall of that year, Christofer Rufo emerged in national media, bringing with him years of local attacks on femmes of color, including WAESN’s co-founder and Executive Director, Dr. Castro-Gill, and exporting that rhetoric to Fox News. It became the perfect storm of racial justice progress and white fearmongering: the beginning of the so-called “anti-CRT movement.”

Over the next few years, WAESN faced some of the harshest headwinds since our founding. As the national conversation turned against Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory (CRT), our organization, and the educators, students, and community members we support, became targets. The rise of fascism, state censorship, and anti-CRT legislation gutted our ability to raise funds through school and district contracts. Both conservative and self-proclaimed “liberal” lawmakers attacked WAESN, mischaracterizing our work and values.

Online trolls and political operatives launched personal attacks intended to discredit our leadership and silence our movement. Despite our team’s best efforts to sustain operations, we ran out of operating funds in January 2025. For months, WAESN functioned as a volunteer organization held together by the willpower of educators and students already stretched thin.

Even during those difficult months, our community never stopped organizing.

The Tipping Point

What I believe finally tipped us over the edge was WAESN’s principled stance against HB2037, proposed in 2024. The bill would have awarded the Holocaust Center for Humanity a $400,000 contract to create “genocide education” that also included funds to draft anti-Islamophobia curriculum. The bill’s sponsor, Representative Travis Couture (R–D35), claimed it had nothing to do with the genocidal actions of the State of Israel. However, testimony from other lawmakers made it clear that the bill aimed to minimize—or erase—the horrific crimes against humanity being committed in Palestine.

WAESN led a statewide coalition of genocide survivors, facilitated by our lobbyist, Oliver Miska, to demand that non-Jewish genocide survivors have the right to tell their own stories without the influence of Zionist organizations. This call for authentic representation in genocide curriculum led to WAESN being labeled antisemitic by state lawmakers. We never called for an end to genocide education, only fair representation for those developing it. Although we did not win that fight, the coalition’s organizing resulted in a first-of-its-kind $180,000 budget proviso to support the development of anti-Islamophobia curriculum written by Muslims in Washington State.

The fight to disrupt HB2037, however, was a detour from our ongoing advocacy for a K–12 Ethnic Studies certification process for educators. During the 2020–2021 school year, WAESN conducted a pilot certification process funded by the Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB). We shared the findings with Representative Sharon Tomiko Santos (D–D37), chair of the House Education Committee and the Educational Opportunity Gap Oversight and Accountability Committee (EOGOAC). She initially agreed that our research demonstrated a clear need and promised to work with us to pass supportive legislation. Shortly afterward, she stopped communicating with us.

Teachers in this study, who viewed themselves as antiracist Ethnic Studies educators, admitted they were poorly prepared to teach Ethnic Studies. The literature review laid bare the curriculum violence that occurs when teachers are ill-prepared to teach the concepts included in the TIAHUI framework. To create a successful and sustainable K–12 Ethnic Studies program, these realities must be taken into consideration by education leaders and policy makers. Studies have consistently shown that teachers enter the profession unprepared to engage in challenging discussions about their own identities, their students’ identities, the racialized experiences of both, and systemic racial oppression. Teachers are letting us know they need and want training on these topics. An assumption can no longer be made that traditionally certificated teachers, such as history and literacy teachers, are capable of teaching Ethnic Studies.

quoted from Implementing Ethnic Studies in Washington State K–12 Schools: Challenges, Training Gaps, and Pathways for Educator Preparation in the Ethnic Studies Pedagogies Journal

We later discovered that Rep. Santos pursued the initiative without input from WAESN or other stakeholders, except PESB, and instead of advocating for a full endorsement pathway, she proposed a budget proviso for an Ethnic Studies specialty endorsement. A specialty endorsement cannot be required to teach a course and offers little practical benefit to educators, rendering it functionally useless. We were told Rep. Santos refused to work with WAESN because of our “reputation” in Olympia as radical antisemites.

“…it is not enough to be a liberal, to have the right attitudes and even to give money to the right causes. You have to know more than that. You have to be prepared to risk more than that.” — James Baldwin

Don’t Call It a Comeback

In a climate where fascism continues to grow and censorship becomes codified into law, our strategy must evolve. Educators are increasingly constrained by district, state, and federal policies that make honest teaching risky. Youth are not.

One of WAESN’s final and most successful initiatives before our restructuring was the Youth Advocacy Summit in January 2025. It was designed and facilitated by youth-led organizations across the Seattle Metro region, including the NAACP Youth Council, WA BUS, the Seattle Student Union, the Legislative Youth Advocacy Council (LYAC), and WAESN’s own Youth Advisory Board (YAB). In the months leading up to the Summit, Oliver Miska collaborated with WAESN’s intern from the UW ECO program, Sophia Hernandez, to help students from various groups write op-eds in the Seattle Emerald on issues important to them, including Ethnic Studies. The Summit brought these student leaders together to launch a broader youth coalition and hold state lawmakers publicly accountable.

That’s why WAESN is shifting its primary focus from training educators to training youth: the next generation of advocates and organizers who are not yet bound by institutional censorship and still protected by free speech (for now).

Our youth leadership programs will provide:

• Civic and legal literacy to help youth understand how systems of power function and how to challenge them.
• Technology and media literacy to equip them to launch advocacy campaigns and protect themselves online.
• Leadership development to build a pipeline of organizers ready to take this fight directly to lawmakers.

WAESN’s Board of Directors and Youth Advisory Board are currently re-writing our Values, Mission, and Vision to center youth leadership development. We have not abandoned educator development; it remains available for those deeply committed to racial justice in schools. However, we know the future is youth-led, community-rooted, and unafraid to confront white supremacy wherever it hides, not in spite of the risks, the trolls, and the spineless politicians, but because of them.

So don’t call it a comeback. We’re still the same organization that was attacked and maligned, just a stronger one that has learned, adapted, and refused to be erased.

Before moving into expressions of gratitude and support, it’s important to acknowledge that our resurgence would not have been possible without our community partnerships and collective resilience.

Support for WAESN

We owe immense gratitude to the Inatai Foundation, which supported WAESN’s work even as we were being maligned, or perhaps because of it. Just when we thought we were down for the count, Inatai invited us to apply for their Systems Change grant. Earlier this fall, we learned we were awarded the grant.

We also thank WAESN’s Sustaining Members, many of whom began providing monthly donations back in 2020 when we were still just an idea and who stayed with us even when we thought we were finished. Their support helped us keep the lights (or website) on while we charted our next steps. Our community means everything to us, and WAESN is committed to living the values of Ethnic Studies for as long as we can.

With support from Inatai and our Sustaining Members, we reinstated our co-founder and Executive Director, Dr. Castro-Gill, and hired a Director of Development and Programs, Asuka Conyer. Staying true to our renewed commitment to youth leadership, we intentionally marketed this position to emerging youth leaders which led us to Asuka, a 24-year-old recent college graduate and racial justice powerhouse. Asuka now facilitates and is working to expand our YAB while managing a new program: the Youth Power Lab.

But this progress depends on ongoing support. Living the values of Ethnic Studies means fairly and sustainably paying people for their labor. As an anti-capitalist organization, WAESN remains committed to offering livable wages and no-cost medical coverage. We need your help to keep building.

Join us in sustaining this movement: become a Sustaining Member, donate, or share our story. Together we can fortify Ethnic Studies against a rising tide of fascism, nurture youth power, and ensure our communities continue to resist, organize, and lead toward liberation.