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Unapologetically Belong: Fostering Critical Consciousness within AAPI Community College Students Through Work-Based Learning Curriculum Grounded in critical asset-based theories, this study examined the experiences of community college students participating in an AAPI learning community and the effects of Capstone projects on their critical consciousness over the course of two months. This qualitative action research case study analyzed student documents, a focus group, and three interviews with 17 students at Hilltop City College. The findings revealed that 1) community cultural wealth was leveraged as tools of resistance and refusal to be defined by dominant narratives; 2) participants owned their power of voice and self-representation; 3) resistance and persistence took different forms depending on students’ positionality and goals; 4) education served as a springboard for collective and individual civic actions; 5) being in community fostered wholeness and healing and inspired learning and self-growth; and 6) emotions played an integral part of the learning and growth process. The study contributes to the scholarship on resisting the structural erasure and misrepresentation of AAPI students and (re)imagining instructional and programmatic practices to serve AAPI students from transactional to transformative ways by developing and evaluating an innovation that: a) raise their critical consciousness to identify, resist, and act against structural and social inequities; b) center them as transformative agents of a more just and liberatory world and holders/producers of intergenerational knowledge; and c) generate nuanced data about the lived experiences of AAPI students, especially those enrolled at Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs).