Raymond Partolan (he/him/his) is the Program Officer, Voting Rights at the State Infrastructure Fund (“SIF”), a non-partisan 501(c)(3) donor collaborative fund at NEO Philanthropy, Inc. that works to increase civic participation and advance voting rights among black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and other historically underrepresented communities. Raymond came to NEO after serving as the National Field Director at Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote (“APIAVote”), where he managed grantmaking programs, leadership development programs, and capacity building programs supporting APIAVote’s 80+ partners in 29 states. His grantmaking portfolio, in 2022, included over $1M in project-specific and general operating support for Asian American and Pacific Islander-serving organizations around the country. Previously, Raymond led grantmaking and capacity building programs at Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta and managed an immigration caseload of complex family-based immigration, federal litigation, and removal defense cases at Kuck Baxter Immigration, LLC.
For over a decade, Raymond has been a fearless advocate for underrepresented communities. He was brought to the United States from the Philippines at the age of one and grew up in Macon, Georgia. At the age of ten, his family lost their immigration status and became undocumented. Thankfully, in 2012, Raymond because a beneficiary of the Obama-era DACA program, which allowed him to regain a semblance of normalcy in his life. He has advocated for immigration reform at the local, state, and federal levels of government, traveling the country to share his experience struggling through America’s immigration system. Raymond finally became a Lawful Permanent Resident of the United States in November 2020 and remains a noncitizen until he becomes eligible for U.S. citizenship in 2025.
A community organizer at heart, Raymond is well-known by civic engagement / voting rights leaders and immigrant rights activists across the country. His track record in using a community-based and intersectional approach to organizing and advocacy has established him as one of the strongest voices among undocumented and formerly-undocumented people. He is a coalition builder, building capacity for local and state-based networks of community organizations aligned around protecting and expanding American Democracy and increasing civic participation. He has engaged with the media on hundreds of occasions to bring the challenges faced by communities of color into the public eye, with coverage in BuzzFeed News, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Atlanta Magazine, NBC News, Business Insider, NPR, the New York Times, and various ethnic media outlets. Raymond was named one of the 25 Most Influential Asian Americans in Georgia in 2018 and 2019. An avid musician, he won three Grammy Awards in 2019 for his work on the highly-acclaimed jazz album, American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom. Raymond graduated summa cum laude from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia and is trilingual in English, Spanish, and Tagalog.