Beckie Masaki

Co-founder and Co-lead, Gathering Strength Collective

Beckie Masaki has worked in the field to end gender-­based violence for 40 years. In the 1980s, she co-­founded one of the first programs in the nation that could meet the language and cultural needs of Asian survivors of domestic violence and trafficking, Asian Women’s Shelter (AWS) in San Francisco, continuing on to serve as the founding executive director for over twenty-­one years. Beckie has been a co-­founder and staff of a national cultural resource center, Asian Pacific Institute on Gender­ Based Violence. She is also a movement-maker in the Move to End Violence (MEV), starting withWArhe 2009 advisory group, first cohort, and currently co-­leads the Communities/ Building the Power of the Margins and Mending the Arc practice groups as part of Resonance, the MEV alumni network. Beckie has extensive experience in providing multilingual, multicultural services to domestic violence and human trafficking survivors and their children, innovative program development, prevention, community building, policy and institutional advocacy, training, technical assistance, and cultural change work.

Beckie is committed to make her best contribution to the movement for race + gender justice as part of an interconnected network of intergenerational, diverse leaders in a new era of shared leadership, shared power, and co­-creation. She lives and works through an intersectional approach that builds the power of the margins and is marked by collective power, collaboration, creativity, and love.