Pictured left to right: Foundation board member Jean Accius, President & CEO Rigo Saborio, MARU CEO June Lee and Associate Director Yeri Shon, and board member Ramiro Zúñiga.
_________________
Archstone Foundation is thrilled to announce that MARU is the recipient of our 2026 Equity in Action Award. The award presentation was a highlight of our second convening of Archstone Foundation grantees and partners at the end of August.
We created the Equity in Action Award to recognize an organization prioritizing community impact, advancing equity, embracing collaborative practice, and adapting to change.
“MARU is a shining example of what we mean by partnering with communities to catalyze equitable change in health and social care systems,” Archstone President and CEO Rigo Saborio said in making the announcement.
Known until this year as the Korean Community Center of the East Bay, MARU has expanded during its 40-year history to serve the wide variety of immigrant and refugee Asian communities across the Bay Area and now has a particular focus on building the advocacy capacity of those communities.
MARU offers a broad array of physical and mental health, wellness, nutrition, and social services in Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin, Khmer, Vietnamese, and English. Among its signature efforts is the Jikimee Senior Leadership Program, which educates older, exclusively Korean speakers in the Bay Area on issues facing the Korean immigrant community. (“Jikimee” means “community protector” in Korean.) The program emphasizes how they can actively participate in finding solutions by making their case at public meetings, advocating with local or state policymakers, or engaging other older Koreans.
“The aim is to build collective power, to build community power” by having people in the program form advocacy partnerships with nonprofits, service agencies and school districts, says June Lee, MARU’s executive director for the past 16 years. “The goal is to meet people's basic needs while helping shape equitable and responsive systems.”
During the Covid pandemic, MARU’s work with local and state health departments helped bring 16 linguistically diverse communities into the Alameda County process of planning its response. The effort was recognized in academic journals as an example of community-government partnership and serves as a replicable model for community-led advocacy.
More recently, through a combination of traditional advocacy and organizing participants in its programs, MARU helped reverse more than $2 million in proposed funding cuts to Alameda County older adult services and restore $350,000 in safety-net benefits.
“We build trust by meeting people’s basic needs, and that trust allows many people to engage more deeply,” says Lee.
She describes how a MARU effort to help a group of older Koreans confront their frequent sense of isolation, which has led to a rise in suicide in their community, prompted participants to join a coalition of more than 30 organizations formed to sustain spending levels in senior service programs. Some went to Sacramento to press their case on state officials, others testified before the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.
We’re working to shift the framework from “How can we collaborate better?” to “What can we accomplish now if all of us are connected more effectively?” says Associate Director Yeri Shon. “We can accomplish more if it's not just organizations representing the people they serve, but if those people bringing their own voices in.”
