In the late 1980s, the Asian Women’s Shelter (AWS) was founded by a determined group of Asian and Asian-American women who recognized the absence of accessible emergency services for limited and non-English speaking immigrant survivors of domestic violence in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the time of AWS’s opening in 1988, there were no shelters in northern California and only two shelters nationally that offered culturally- and language-accessible services for Asian women and children. Those shelters were the New York Asian Women’s Shelter in New York City and the Center for the Pacific Asian Family in Los Angeles. Over the past 18 years, AWS has become a nationally recognized organization that has spearheaded groundbreaking programs, including the Multilingual Access Model Program, the Peer-to-Peer Technical Assistance Project, and the Queer Asian Women’s Services Program.