Asian American Center of Excellence (AACE)

As a part of Asian American Health Initiative’s evolving efforts in capacity building, AAHI has formed the Asian American Center of Excellence (AACE). The goal of the AACE is to support Asian American-serving community organizations in developing and increasing their capacity to successfully provide health, wellness, and social support programs and services. The AACE is a premiere resource to Asian American community organizations to improve technical skills related to organizational sustainability, such as data collection and analysis, evaluation, program planning, and partnership building among others.

The services and offerings of AACE will be guided by the World Health Organization’s definition of capacity building:

“Capacity building is the development of knowledge, skills, commitment, structures, systems and leadership to enable effective health promotion…[with] actions to improve health at three levels: the advancement of knowledge and skills among practitioners; the expansion of support and infrastructure for health promotion in organizations, and; the development of cohesiveness and partnerships for health in communities.”

In line with this, AACE’s services include:

• Microgrants for AAPI-serving organizations to build organizational capacity 
• Monthly curated email digest for AAPI leaders
• Networking opportunities for leaders of AAPI-serving organizations
• Data roundtables for AAPI leaders
• Technical assistance workshops
• One-on-One strategy consultations

Microgrants

Annually, AACE has Microgrant opportunities for AAPI-serving community-based organizations, faith institutions, and non-profits. The goal of the Microgrants is to provide organizations with funding to support their operations and organizational needs. Through this funding, AACE seeks to build capacity and strengthen organizational sustainability of local organizations that play a critical role in addressing the health, wellness, and social support needs of AAPIs in Montgomery County.

AACE funds Microgrants in three categories:

• Purchase of Equipment
• Professional Development
• Consultants

Applications for the FY26 Microgrants for Capacity Building will be open until March 6, 2026 at 5:00 PM EST. For information on the FY23 and FY24 Microgrants, please click on the buttons below.

Networking Opportunities

AACE hosts regular networking events for AAPI leaders. Networking events are meant to be a time to bring together leaders within the AAPI community to connect, share best practices, learn from one another, and identify opportunities for collaboration and partnership.

Networking events will be held later this year. Sign up for the AACE email digest to stay informed on dates for networking opportunities. 

FY25 AAPI CBO Networking Night
AACE conducted its first inaugural networking event on June 10, 2025, at VisArts in Rockville in collaboration with PCC. The “AAPI CBO Networking Night” was well attended by 23 AAPI leaders representing 23 different organizations serving the community in Montgomery County. The event was designed to network and create a platform for leaders to connect with each other and find the ground for collaboration. Information on current funding opportunities was also provided during the event.

Data Roundtables

To address limited availability of data around AAPI health needs, AACE encourages AAPI-serving organizations to collect their own data, both around needs and program use. Through our work with community organizations, we recognize that data collection can be challenging and oftentimes it can slow down service provision. To provide better solutions, AACE holds data roundtables with AAPI community leaders to better understand the challenges around data collection and analysis.

Input from community leaders attending this Roundtable will guide AAHI’s capacity building efforts around data collection and will be integrated into an upcoming capacity building workshop series open to all Montgomery County AAPI-serving organizations. Attendees of the Roundtable will be invited to share their organizations’ capabilities around data collection and reporting, and how AACE can assist with enhancing skills and capacity in this area. Through the Roundtable, we hope to identify solutions and supports that will increase the availability of local AAPI data.

Sign up for the AACE email digest to stay informed on and participate in the data roundtables.

Bootcamps

FY25 AACE Data Bootcamp
AACE 2-day data bootcamp was conducted on April 7, and April 8, 2025, at Rockville. The data bootcamp was well attended by 21 attendees representing 10 non-profit organizations serving AAPI community in Montgomery County. The bootcamp was led by an expert and attendees had hands-on-learning. Over the 2 days attendees learned the fundamentals of simple spreadsheets, how to manage, clean and tabulate data with formulas and pivot tables in Excel. Participants gained the skills to create an interactive dashboard using Excel and effectively communicate data driven stories. In addition to that, attendees learned to create a dashboard using Power BI.

You may use this Excel spreadsheet to practice while following along with the Data Bootcamp recordings

Data Bootcamp 1: Text Editing

Data Bootcamp 2: Birthdates into Age Ranges

Data Bootcamp 3: Merging and Lookups

Data Bootcamp 4: Excel Dashboards

Data Bootcamp 5: Power BI Dashboards

Mini Data Bootcamp

Workshops

To strengthen technical skills related to non-profit management, business operations, data collections, and public health best practices, AACE offers workshops and bootcamps to leaders and staff of AAPI-serving organizations. The aim of these workshops is to equip organizations with practical skills they can apply to their organization’s practice. 

Sign up for the AACE email digest to stay informed on future workshop dates. 

To access previous AACE workshop presentations and recordings, please click on the “AACE Workshops Archive” button below.

Workshop 3: Identifying Local, State, and Federal Grants

AAHI hosted the third and last workshop in its FY 26 series on February 24, 2026. The session, titled “Identifying Local, State, and Federal Grants,” was well-attended, with 19 participants from 14 organizations. The workshop covered strategic prospect research, techniques for effective prospecting, demonstrations of several free databases and tools for finding grant opportunities, and approaches to funder cultivation.

The slides and recording from this informative webinar are available below:

View the Presentation HERE

View the Recording HERE

Workshop 2: Budgeting Basics

AAHI hosted the second workshop in its FY26 series on January 13, 2026. The session, titled “Budgeting Basics,” was well-attended, with 16 participants representing 13 organizations. The workshop focused on building grant-ready budgets that are clear, defensible, and aligned with funder expectations, including hands-on exercises around Full Time Equivalent (FTE), indirect costs, and fringe benefits. Attendees were also provided with budget forecasting tools and resources that can be used in the future.

The slides and recording from this informative webinar are available below:

View the Presentation HERE

View the Recording HERE

Budgeting Resources HERE

Workshop 1: Writing Compelling Narratives

AAHI hosted the first workshop in its new series on December 9, 2025. The session, titled “Writing Compelling Narratives,” was well-attended, with 20 participants actively engaging in the interactive format. The workshop focused on helping attendees craft compelling narratives that effectively highlight their organization’s mission, impact, and unique value—especially when applying for grants and other funding opportunities. The slides and recording from this informative webinar are available below:

View the Presentation HERE

View the Recording HERE

Strategy Consultations

AACE regularly offers organizations with the opportunity to meet one-on-one with experts in non-profit management, business operations, data collections, and public health to provide strategy consultations to AAPI-serving organizations. Through strategy consultations, AACE aims to support organizations by developing personalized plans on how to integrate best practices into existing operations.

Consultations are available upon request. To support organizations, we are pleased to offer free 1-on-1 strategy consultations on grant writing, data collection, analysis challenges, and solutions to nonprofit organizations serving the AAPI community in Montgomery County. These consultations are intended to facilitate your capacity and capability to serve the AAPI residents.

Each organization will receive a consultation meeting with an AAHI expert, and the meeting will be up to one hour. Organization may request another consultation meeting if needed. You may select who attends these consultation meetings, but one of the attendees must be the decision maker in the organization. Other attendees may include the person entering and analyzing the data, other staff, and volunteers.

To see if your organization is a good candidate to participate in these consultations, please fill out this request form. You will be contacted after your submission is reviewed.