About Us
AAPI communities are not one story, but many — dozens of distinct ethnicities, languages, and lived experiences. Our work centers that specificity, ensuring the histories we help tell reflect the communities they actually belong to, rather than a single, generalized narrative. It also recognizes the strong history of connections and coalition building between many AAPI communities and other marginalized groups.
Our work with schools and organizations draws on expertise in teaching, curriculum design, facilitation, and AAPI history. Every engagement is grounded in community voice and long-term relationship building.
What We Do
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Professional Learning
We create and facilitate professional development that provides teachers with rich educational tools to engage their students. We also provide inquiry-based workshops that enlist educators in knowledge-building about Asian American and Pacific Islander history and stories.
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Youth Workshops & Guest Teaching
We bring AAPI history and stories directly into classrooms and youth spaces through interactive workshops and guest teaching, grounded in culturally relevant, Ethnic Studies teaching practices that center student engagement and empowerment.
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Consulting
We consult with museums, schools, and organizations tailored to their specific AAPI-centered programming or projects — offering guidance at every stage, from early planning to implementation.
Our Story
In 2016, YURI co-founders Cathlin Goulding and Freda Lin met at a pilgrimage to Tule Lake. These pilgrimages invite people to return to a former prison camp that incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II. At the time, Freda -- a Taiwanese American hailing from Long Island -- was working as the education program director for the Fred T. Korematsu Institute. A descendant of Japanese American prisoners, Cath was researching the pilgrimage for a dissertation at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Freda and Cath located commonalities between their personal histories and praxis as educators. Their meeting was the start of the YURI Education Project. Both former classroom teachers, they united in a shared mission to bring Asian American stories and histories into PK-12 schools. This perspective was missing not only from their own PK-12 education but also from their later teacher education programs. They founded YURI to bring rich, accessible curriculum to learners and the teachers who are creating inviting, culturally responsive learning environments for ALL students.
When they decided to create their own education project, Cath and Freda thought about the people who influenced their day-to-day work as educators. They wanted to name the project after a person who embodied their feminist, anti-imperialist values. They wanted someone who was embedded across geographies, as they, too, inhabited multiple coastal cities in the U.S. and remained connected to transnational identities. And as people vested in working across racial lines, too, Cath and Freda wanted their project to fully reflect anti-racist solidarity.
YURI Education Project is named after Yuri Kochiyama.
As a young girl who was incarcerated with her family and approximately 120,000 other Americans of Japanese ancestry, Yuri Kochiyama understood the meaning of injustice. This experience shaped her compassion to lead and work with communities of various backgrounds in their struggles for change. Her collaboration with Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, advocacy for Puerto Rican independence, the pursuit of redress and reparations for the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and support of the ethnic studies movements in universities and colleges are all an inspiration to Cath and Freda. Yuri forged connections and built bridges between communities.
