The National Association of Asian American Professionals is a non-profit organization that cultivates and empowers Asian & Pacific Islander leaders through leadership development, professional networking, and community service.

As the largest and fastest-growing API professionals association, NAAAP continues to provide its members with the tools and resources to further career advancement and to empower Asians and Pacific Islanders to become great leaders as well as valuable employees.

In order to achieve our goals, NAAAP offers a diverse range of professional development programs on the local and national level, engages its membership in community service, and organizes professional networking events. These may range from a series of panels, workshops and seminars, and web-based sessions and networking.

NAAAP was founded 38 years ago, in 1982, in New York City. At first, the organization was called the National Association of Young Asian Professionals, the name was soon changed to embrace a broader range of Asian Pacific American (APA) professionals and to better reflect the rapidly changing demographic.

The brutal murder of Vincent Chin in 1982 had acutely raised awareness of the importance of activism, not only in the Chinese American community but amongst all Asian Pacific Americans. Just as we needed civil rights activism, we also need to take our own professional destinies in our hands to overcome discrimination in the workplace and break the glass ceiling. 

To make NAAAP available to a wider audience, beginning in 1997, NAAAP National encouraged the development of chapter start-ups. While some ventures grew slowly, other chapters expanded to 500 members. Today, there are more than 30 chapters across the United States, Canada, and China.