Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Leadership Council

Semoon, a Korean-American, is a retired professor of economics. Based on his experience as a sole care giver of his late wife, he has been writing articles on the issue of compassion on hospice patients and retirement of the elderly. His recent articles include: “Desperate Needs for Compassion from Oncologists,” Journal of Palliative Care & Medicine (2018); “Do Oncologists Care about Their Dying Patients?” Annals of Palliative Care & Medicine (2019), and “Can Dance Be in Every Woman’s Retirement Plan?” Acta Scientific Women’s Health (2019, with D. Anne Martin). Semoon also published a book on the subject of compassion: Desperate Needs for Compassion from Oncologists (Mauritius: Scholar’s Press, 2019). Currently, Semoon resides at the Leisure World of Maryland, and an active member of the Compassion and Choices Club of the Leisure World.

Ben de Guzman is the Acting Director of the Mayor’s Office on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs (MOAPIA). The agency is the largest one of its kind in the country, centering AAPI residents of the nation’s capital and serving as a liaison to city government. He comes to MOAPIA from the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs, where he served as the Community Outreach Specialist. During his tenure there, he helped the agency assume the lead role in presenting the 32nd Annual 17th Street High Heel Race, a time-honored institution of the District’s LGBTQ community.

He has been a leading voice at the local and national level on issues of racial equity, immigrants’ rights, veterans affairs, and LGBT justice for twenty years. As an advocate for equity and recognition for Filipino veterans of World War II, he played a key role in two of the most significant legislative victories on behalf of these soldiers. He led communications and outreach strategies for the Filipino Veterans Recognition and Education Project that led to the passage of the Filipino Veterans of WWII Congressional Gold Medal Act in 2016. He also served as the National Coordinator for the National Alliance for Filipino Veterans Equity, where he organized a national legislative campaign that created the Filipino Veterans Equity Compensation Fund in 2009.

For almost ten years, he was principal staff at the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA), where he managed the policy and programmatic work for NQAPIA and its federation of 40 Asian American, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander LGBT groups around the country. As the public face of the organization, he spearheaded efforts to promote both national LGBT campaigns around comprehensive immigration reform and a national LGBT Pride Month campaign from Asian American/ Pacific Islander advocacy organizations.

His work in Asian American and Pacific Islander communities has spanned across the age spectrum. As a trainer for OCA: Asian Pacific American Advocates APIAU Leadership 101 program, he has trained over 1,000 youth and college students. As the National Managing Coordinator for the Diverse Elders Coalition, he led a national program to coordinate cross-sectoral work to bring together elders of color, LGBT elders, and Native American/ Indian American elders to engage the 2015 White House Conference on Aging.

He has authored articles and op-eds that have appeared in mainstream and special interest media, anthologies, and academic publications, including the Encyclopedia of Asian American Issues Today. In 2015, he received a Community Service Award from Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and is pleased to come to MOAPIA and help recognize exciting new leaders moving forward.

Ben is the son of Filipino immigrants and was born and raised in New Jersey. He first moved to the District in 1997 and is a proud resident of Ward 1.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Dr. Tomita attended UCLA before attending medical school at UCSF.  After completing his internship and residency in Fresno in family medicine, he joined Kaiser Permanente in San Diego in 1975.  He retired from full-time family practice at Kaiser in 2008 and then did some part-time work in community health centers in the San Joaquin Valley as well as in Washington state.  He splits his time between San Diego and Seattle. He was an Assistant Clinical Professor on the voluntary faculty of the UCSD School of Medicine before retirement.

Vincent Wiraatmadja is an experienced policy advocate working at the intersection of climate policy and technology. Before joining the Climate Center, a climate non-profit, in 2021 as its first Government Affairs Manager, Wiraatmadja worked for more than half a decade at the Weideman Group, where he represented Compassion and Choices in its successful effort to enact California’s End of Life Option Act in 2015. Wiraatmadja’s portfolio also encompassed representation of numerous clean energy and clean transportation companies before the Legislature and regulatory agencies. During the course of that work, Wiraatmadja was at the center of numerous efforts to enact policy frameworks that enabled the development and adoption of the climate-focused technologies California needs to achieve its ambitious goals, ranging from heavy-duty zero-emission vehicles to resilient distributed energy systems. Wiraatmadja now uses this robust combination of policy knowledge, legislative strategy, and understanding of the business environment to support the Climate Center and its focus on accelerating climate action timelines in California through legislation and other policy mechanisms.