The California Young Women’s Collaborative (CYWC), NAPAWF’s flagship youth-led research and activism project, made its way down to Southern California in Fall 2009. CSU Fullerton’s Asian American Studies program was excited to sponsor the CYWC project last year, where 11 students led community-based participatory research regarding women’s reproductive and sexual health. The focus was on female college students’ attitudes and behaviors towards contraception and Pap tests.

The highlight of our social activism was traveling to Sacramento to present our research findings at the API Policy Summit on May 4. Eight students were able to attend the event. During our trip, the Sacramento NAPAWF sisters graciously hosted our group and we met sisters from other chapters. The sisters shared stories about what they are doing for their communities and their goals, which inspired some of us at CSUF to consider starting a chapter for Orange County.

We feel that we are the “never-ending” cohort. We are still continuing some our social activities even though our class is over. Over a period of 10 weeks, seven students co-authored a manuscript highlighting ethnic differences around Pap knowledge and screening rates and submitted it to a peer-reviewed journal. This in essence allowed us to travel the full circle of the community-based participatory research process. We are pleased to report that our manuscript is currently under review. Also, three of us are going to be presenting alongside our professor, Sang Leng Trieu, at the California Wellness Foundation conference in Los Angeles to a statewide audience of women’s health advocates regarding our research. We want to continue sharing our research findings and knowledge.

In efforts to keep the momentum of our social action going despite the end of the school year, one way is to start a NAPAWF Orange County chapter so that we can continue presenting our work, educating our communities, and continuing our friendships. Orange County is a well-populated API community and we noticed that there are not many API organizations nor a local NAPAWF chapter in our community that meets the need of API women and the issues we care about. We decided to create an OC NAPAWF chapter. Our plans for the OC chapter will be an extension of our class. Our current mission is to continue promoting and informing people about reproductive and sexual health, unifying generation gaps, promoting awareness on sensitive issues by holding future health fairs and workshops, and discussing current issues that may or will affect our community. The OC chapter is currently working on recruiting more students and is open to having male allies because they were a huge asset to our cohort.

In August, hundreds of friends, family, and colleagues gathered on both the East and West Coasts to celebrate the life of Joannie Chang. Among her many accomplishments, Joannie was a NAPAWF Founding Sister who helped to build the platform for NAPAWF soon after graduating from law school. Joannie touched the lives of many people through her dedicated work as a civil rights lawyer and as a loving, generous, and wonderful friend to many. Joannie was a fierce sister in every respect – she was a leader in the civil rights community, she worked tirelessly to fight for social justice, in her personal life she was carefree and fearless, and she lived her life proud to be a lesbian and a Taiwanese native.

As a diehard public interest lawyer, Joannie rejected the more profitable path of corporate law in order to serve poor, working class, and underprivileged communities. She worked for various nonprofits in the Bay Area, including Equal Rights Advocates, Employment Law Center, and the Asian Law Caucus. More recently, Joannie worked for the San Francisco’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, where she helped to implement San Francisco’s ground-breaking health care coverage ordinance. In her professional life, Joannie was a mentor to many, she was always a positive force in any working environment, and she was very loved by her colleagues.

Joannie was not only a fierce advocate in her professional life, but she was equally fierce in how she lived and enjoyed her life. She had a huge community of friends around her, she loved to eat, travel, and eat more, she adored her pets and took them to work with her, and she was an AIDS ride fanatic who clocked thousands of miles on her bike to raise money for AIDS treatment. Joannie was also a loving partner to Luna Yasui, a fierce sister in her own right, and together they worked hard, fought the good fight, and played hard too.

Joannie lived her dream of starting a family with Luna and gave birth to twin girls in June of 2010. Sadly, Joannie was diagnosed with stomach cancer late in her pregnancy and died just four weeks after giving birth. While her friends and family gathered to mourn the tragic circumstances surrounding Joannie’s death, we witnessed an amazing community come together to give love and support to Joannie’s twin girls and to celebrate the beautiful lives that she left behind. If you would like to contribute to the fund started by Joannie and Luna’s friends to help with medical expenses and care for their twin daughters, Ayumi and Yuuki, please e-mail Jenny Huang at jennyhuang673@yahoo.com.

Read NAPAWF’s statement on Joannie.

Eliminating the wage gap is of critical importance to API women, whether they are single mothers, supporting older relatives, or just trying to put themselves through college. Imagine the businesses that could be started, the homes bought, and the family members sent to higher education if we achieved pay equity! API women can’t afford the wage gap anymore.

Urge your Senators to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act, prohibits retaliation against workers who disclose their wages, strengthens data collection on pay information, and rewards good behavior of employers who treat their employees fairly.

In solidarity,

NAPAWF

Monday, March 22, 2010

Late last night the House of Representatives took the historic step of passing the bill that paves the way for passage of sweeping health insurance reforms that are going to help millions of people in the U.S.

Thank you for taking action to help us get this far. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Is the bill perfect? No, but it’s a step in the right direction to covering more people, ending some of the most unfair and abusive insurance practices and expanding vital safety net programs. Once signed into law, over 30 million currently uninsured people will have health insurance. Insurance companies will be banned from gender rating and from denying individuals coverage for having pre-existing conditions. Medicaid and CHIP, vital programs for low-income individuals, are extended. The bill includes strong mandates for collecting data on race, ethnicity, gender, geographic location, language, socioeconomic status, and disability status, which will improve health outcomes for API women and girls.

We are disappointed in the treatment of immigrants and abortion access in the final bill. The bill failed to lift the five-year bar on access to Medicaid for lawfully present immigrants, and excludes undocumented immigrants from participating in the new health insurance exchanges using their own money. The bill also includes the problematic Nelson amendment, which unfairly singles out abortion by requiring participants in the health exchanges who want abortion coverage to make two separate payments: one for the premium, and one for the abortion coverage.

NAPAWF believes health care is a human right, and we still firmly believe that punitive and exclusionary immigration policies and burdensome abortion restrictions are wrong and need to be reversed. We will work tirelessly until this is true.

In solidarity,

NAPAWF

Barriers to Counting Asian Americans

Communities of color are disproportionately under-counted in the census. API communities can be under-counted for many reasons:

• Lower education levels or limited English proficiency affect the ability of many individuals to understand the census
• General misunderstanding of the importance of census participation
• Fears that the census may be used by immigration or law enforcement officials to deport an individual or family member or to disqualify someone for social welfare programs.

It’s important to acknowledge and address those fears directly. Here are some facts that respected community leaders can help deliver between now and April 1, 2010:

• Census answers cannot be used against you in any way. Individual census responses are confidential and protected by the strongest national privacy laws on the books.
• The census form does not ask about citizenship status.
• No other government agency – not immigration officials, law enforcement, housing authorities, or the courts – can get any person’s individual census answers for the next 72 years.
• Every census worker swears an oath to keep information confidential – and anyone who violates that confidentiality can be imprisoned for up to five years and fined $250,000.

A note for bi-racial households: It is not widely known that the race of the household member who fills out the census form determines the racial designation of a family in one of the census’ major statistical tables. Given that people of color are often under-counted by the census, couples or families may want to consider having a person of color identify as “household member #1″ when filling out the form for a family.

An Accurate Census Benefits APIs

Governments and private companies use census numbers in deciding where to spend money for schools, housing, health care, job training, economic development and more. Every person who goes uncounted costs their community more than $14,000 in funding for these important public services.

Census information also helps in determining political representation and enforcing civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination in housing and employment. For example:

• Political Power – The census shapes voting districts, which can determine whether or not communities are fairly represented in Congress, state legislatures and local governments.

• Voting Rights – Census information is used to decide which communities will get voting ballots and other important government documents in Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and other languages. The census is also used to monitor whether people have access to the voting booth.

• Education – Billions of dollars in education funding are distributed based on census information.

• Health Care – The Public Health Service Act uses data on race and national origin to identify populations that may not have access to adequate medical care. Census data influences the distribution of funding for programs that support community health care.

• Jobs – The census influences the distribution of community development block grants and is used by state governments and private companies to decide where to build new housing, roads, and shopping centers. Census information also helps the government monitor discrimination and enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1965, ensuring equal opportunity in the workplace.

Federal Funding

It’s all in the numbers—more than $400 billion in federal funding is distributed every year based on census information. Here are some ways the census affects API children, families, and communities:

• Title 1: Support for schools serving low-income students – $7.7 billion
  Thirty percent of Asian and Pacific Islander students attend high-poverty schools that are targeted by Title 1, which provides financial assistance to local educational agencies and schools with high numbers of low-income children. In the 2006-07 school year, Title I served more than half a million Asian and Pacific Islander children.

• English Language Acquisition Grants – $647 million
  Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act authorizes grants to states to serve students with limited English proficiency. Over 33 percent of the Asian and Pacific Islander community has limited English proficiency, and 63 percent are foreign-born. On average, Asian students attend schools that are 25 percent Asian and have a high concentration of English language learners.

• Head Start – $5.7 billion
  Head Start provides grants for early childhood education and development programs for economically disadvantaged children and families, with a focus on helping pre-school children get ready for school and engaging parents in the learning process. Asian and Pacific Islanders make up about 2.5 percent of Head Start enrollment.

• Medicaid
  In 2006, about 1.4 million Asian and Pacific Islanders were enrolled in Medicaid, which provides medical benefits to people without insurance or with inadequate insurance.

• Community Development Block Grants – $6.3 billion
  Federal Community Development Block Grants improve the life of communities living at or below the Federal Poverty Guidelines by providing low-income housing and expansion of economic opportunities.

More information is available from the Asian and Pacific Islander 2010 Census Network (API Count) at www.apicount.com, the Asian American Justice Center at www.fillinourfuture.org and from the Leadership Conference Education Fund at www.civilrights.org/census.

Yesterday, an anti-abortion amendment introduced by Senators Nelson and Hatch was defeated in the Senate by a vote of 54-45.  The Nelson amendment would have mirrored the Stupak amendment that passed in the House, banning abortion coverage in public and private insurance plans that receive federal funds.

Thank you for sending the right message to our lawmakers: API women need abortion care, and we won’t stand for health reform that ignores women’s needs. In particular, NAPAWF would like to thank those 16 Senators who spoke on the floor against the amendment.  Those members are:

Baucus (D-MT), Boxer (D-CA), Cardin (D-MD), Dodd (D-CT), Durbin (D-IL), Feinstein (D-CA), Franken (D-MN), Gillibrand (D-NY), Lautenberg (D-NJ), Menendez (D-NJ), Mikulski (D-MD), Murray (D-WA), Reid (D-NV), Shaheen (D-NH), Specter (D-PA), Stabenow (D-MI)

If you live in their state, please call to thank them! The Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 can connect you.

Our work is still not done–we need to make sure the anti-abortion Stupak language does not make it into the final health reform bill sent to the President. Sign the petition reiterating that we will not stand for health care reform that makes women less healthy and less safe. NAPAWF will continue to closely monitor developments in Congress and advocate for health reform that protects comprehensive reproductive health services for API women and girls.

In thanks and solidarity,
NAPAWF

You must register for this event.
Start Time: 08:00
Date: 2010-03-18
End Time: 16:00

Thank you for organizing call-in day activities, as NAPAWF’s Seattle chapter did, for attending the rally in San Francisco, as our Bay Area chapter did, and for visiting legislators in DC to tell them to vote no on Stupak-like abortion restrictions and anti-immigrant amendments in health reform, as members of our Las Vegas and DC chapters did.

NAPAWF needs to gather information about what you or your chapter did on the National Day of Action.  Did you make posters for a rally? Did you call your representative in Congress? Did you attend a demonstration? Did you take photos? Please email Amanda at rjfellow@napawf.org to tell us what YOU did to amplify API women’s voices.

And let’s keep the momentum going. Follow up by signing the petition and making calls to your legislators.