DOWNTOWN : Asian Legal Center Celebrates 10 Years

Capping the achievements of its first 10 years will be the challenge for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center as it enters its second decade.

In its relatively brief existence, the center at 1010 S. Flower St. has grown from a small, church-backed local service to the nation’s largest legal center for Asian Pacific Americans. In the last year alone, the center provided legal assistance to more than 14,000 people, spearheaded riot-relief efforts and improvement of race relations, and helped launch the first national Asian-American civil rights group.

Through the years, the center has also become a leading advocate of language and immigration rights, a monitor of hate crimes against Asians and Asian-Americans and a training center for interethnic community leaders.

“We’re fairly new, but we’ve grown fairly rapidly,” said Executive Director Stewart Kwoh.

The center formally celebrates its 10th anniversary at a fund-raising dinner Thursday night at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel.

Kwoh and several other Asian-American lawyers and community leaders founded the center in 1983 after the 1980 Census showed that the Asian-American population in the United States had doubled between 1970 and 1980. The group founded the center with the goal of providing the growing Asian-American community with multilingual, culturally sensitive legal services and education.

“We decided the time had come for a publicly supported legal center,” said Kwoh, a Silver Lake resident. “We knew at the grass-roots level that we weren’t the ‘model minority.’ ”

With a staff of 30 and a volunteer corps of 300, most of them practicing attorneys, the center serves clients in five Asian languages and in Spanish. Supported with corporate donations and public grants, the center has strived in recent years to reach beyond the Asian-American community and serve clients of other ethnicities and to work with other organizations.

“We see ourselves as service providers and advocates for the Asian Pacific American community and as bridge builders with the larger community of Los Angeles,” Kwoh said.

Last year’s riots brought these “bridging” efforts to the forefront. The center not only helped hundreds of Asian riot victims apply for financial assistance and legally fight insurance fraud, but also worked with leaders of the African-American and Latino communities to help calm racial tensions.

The legal center helped create the Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center, which works closely with the Martin Luther King Dispute Resolution Center in South-Central to team Korean-American and African-American mediators.

The Leadership Development in Interethnic Relations program has also become particularly important in the last year. Begun more than a year before the riots, the program aims to facilitate dialogue among ethnic groups by training individuals to become leaders in these efforts. The legal center teams with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the League of United Latin American Citizens to provide the nine-month training course to 25 people from South-Central, Koreatown, the San Gabriel Valley and the South Bay.

Dinner information: (213) 748-2022.