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In 2024, the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival had a banner year. It was the organization’s 17th festival and the one that marked a definitive victory over the COVID-19 pandemic slump. The fall festival of films from the Asian diaspora saw an audience increase of 200%.
The year before, in 2023, the festival had finally gotten a paid, full-time staff of three employees after having been run chiefly by volunteers since 2008.
Executive Director Nani Shin started to think big.
“We wanted to become more structured and professionalized,” Shin said. “That’s really the shift that allowed us to focus more on how we build this organization to sustain itself and build beyond the annual festival.”
After years of being fiscally sponsored by the Greater Philadelphia Film Office, the festival became an independent nonprofit organization in 2025, calling itself the Philadelphia Asian American Film Foundation and anticipating new fundraising opportunities to develop year-round programming.
But the foundation’s optimistic expectations ran headlong into reality.
In the spring of 2025, federal support of the arts was disrupted by the Trump administration, particularly in areas focused on diversity.
“What we didn’t expect was these major cuts on the federal level trickle down and affect the smaller grants that we were going after,” Shin said.
Then in the fall of 2025, one of the festival’s’s major corporate sponsors pulled out.
When the festival came around in November, Shin did something the foundation had never done before, launch a public fundraising campaign. So far, it has not performed as hoped, generating about 10% of its $150,000 goal, with a March 1 end date.
Shin had anticipated a longer runway toward establishing sustainable revenue streams. She described the campaign as “absolutely critical” with less than six months of cash reserves to pay for operations. But she is confident the foundation will ultimately find its financial footing.
“What we weren’t prepared for was the timeline, the urgency of it,” she said. “We were already out doing the work that we have committed to do, so we definitely had to pivot and scale it down.”
Shin is preparing to turn the foundation’s finances inside-out during two public town hall-style meetings on Monday, Feb. 9, and Wednesday, Feb. 11 at 5 p.m., inviting filmmakers, partners and interested parties to hear the internal struggles of the organization and, maybe, share their own.
“I’m hoping what that does is spark conversation where it can become very interactive and hear from all the attendees if they feel that it resonated with them,” Shin said. “Whether they want to share their own story or have some recommendations, I just really want it to be an open space.”