Young Women’s Leadership Development
California Young Women’s Collaborative
The California Young Women’s Collaborative (CYWC) is NAPAWF’s comprehensive youth-led research and activism project. Through youth empowerment, leadership development and skills building, API undergraduate college women develop and lead community-based research and organizing campaigns around women’s sexual health issues. The students’ own groundbreaking research findings guide their subsequent campus and community involvement.
» Get connected! Find CYWC on Facebook.
St. Cloud Chapter Teen Retreat
From May 24-25, 2008, the NAPAWF-St. Cloud chapter organized a teen retreat that took place in Alexandria, MN. The teens learned about NAPAWF’s social justice work, talked about what they wanted to change, and the challenges they faced encountering racism in their schools and communities.
The California Young Women’s Collaborative
The California Young Women’s Collaborative (CYWC) is NAPAWF’s comprehensive youth-led research and activism project. Through youth empowerment, leadership development and skills building, Asian and Pacific Islander female college students develop and lead community-based research and organizing campaigns around women’s sexual health issues. The students’ own groundbreaking research findings guide their subsequent campus and community involvement.
Why is this project important?
The CYWC project was developed as a response to the low levels of exisiting knowledge and communication about API sexual health, both within and outside of the API community. Although APIs make up five percent of the U.S. population, only two percent of all sexual health articles include APIs. This lack of research reveals a deep, sustained inequity in the amount of funding, research and attention that APIs continue to receive in the realm of health, despite being the fastest-growing ethnic population in the country. It is critical that our community’s repoductive health disparities be addressed in order to adequately meet the needs and rights of all women and girls, both statewide and nationally
.
Our strategy
:
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Conduct research projects on college campuses. Student researchers gain the skills necessary to ethically and thoroughly gather data on the sexual and reproductive health of API women at their schools.
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Launch campaigns that bridge research, organizing, and young women leaders to transform local, state and/or national policy to better support women and girls.
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Help to facilitate student empowerment through skills-building and recognition of youth leadership. Empowerment stems from youth taking the lead in addressing the issues that impact themselves and their communities.
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Document and share innovations on research, organizing and advocacy with allied activists.
Our goal is to create (and continually improve upon) an innovative, effective and culturally competent model on California’s college campuses to cultivate the next generation of young API reproductive justice leaders, researchers, health care providers, teachers, activists, advocates and mentors.
Student teams:
Past CYWC student cohorts have been at San Francisco State University and UC Davis, focusing on the use of contraception among young Chinese and Filipina female students, and barriers to detecting cervical cancer among young Vietnamese female students. Currently there are two student cohorts at UC Berkeley examining access to sexual health services and violence against wom
en.
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For more information, contact Bonnie Chan, CYWC Coordinator, at bchan@napawf.org, or visit www.napawf.org.
