Creating awareness in America is a crucial part of Anakbayan’s plans to actualize these changes. Anakbayan emphasizes the role of education in creating awareness through educational workshops and discussions, including 8-hour discussions of the Philippine Society of Sison and its revolution, which has helped Anakbayan make many recruitments especially form college campuses. In addition, Anakbayan organizes tours to the Philippines to give people exposure and allow them to gain on-the-ground experience about the problems that Filipinos go through. Members of Anakbayan USA mobilize, protest, and highlight different ways that Filipinos and other US-imperialism victims experience exploitation and violence against US institutions. Through its stop the killings campaign, Anakbayan protests against extra-judicial killings of National Democratic activists by creating awareness of how the American-trained Philippines-backed military is involved in extra-judicial killings. One such instance is the killing of Anakbayan member Freddie Ligiw in Abra, Philippines, together with his father and brother. The victims’ bodies were found on 8th March, 2014, in a shallow grave with their mouths gagged and hands tied. Freddie disappeared on 2nd March, 2014, right before his scheduled meeting with human rights advocates.
Apart from educating the Filipino youth, Anakbayan USA has various other campaigns. The majority of these campaigns are focused on advocacy against bad immigration policies, workers’ and students’ rights, and solidarity with other marginalized communities like Native Americans, women, and other immigrants. Jonna Valdez, Akbayan’s premier secretary for the New York-New Jersey chapter in 2006, relates that one of the initial efforts of the NY-NJ chapter was the support of the Sentosa 27. The Sentosa 27 included a physical therapist and twenty-six nurses recruited from the Philippines through New York’s recruitment company Sentosa Care LLC. The twenty-seven immigrants were lured to New York with the promise of directly working for the nursing home facilities that had helped sponsor their work visas. However, when they stepped foot on US soil, the majority of nurses discovered that they were to work in nursing facilities different from the one they had been promised. Others discovered that their permit applications had neither been processed nor processed. Due to these factors, most of the 27 immigrants could not start working immediately after arriving in New York.
Consequently, they had to take up jobs as clerks earning meager wages. Even after the health workers received their work permits, they still continued to experience poor working and living conditions. According to most of the health workers, the staff quarters were in terrible condition, they use extremely old appliances and furniture, and the quarters were very crowded. Archiel Buagas, one of the 27 workers, recounts that she had to attend thirty to sixty people on average in one shift and continually multitask, handling the work of 2 to 3 people. When the health workers downed their tools and launched a legal assault against Sentosa, Anakbayan USA was one of the organizations at the forefront of advocating for the workers’ rights. Anakbayan USA helped hold the Sentosa Healthcare organization to account and helped the nurses with their licenses, most of which had been revoked.