All of our lives have been changed in one sense or another by the COVID-19 pandemic, most times for the worse. At Advancing Justice this week, my supervisor Benjamin Tran and I got a clearer picture as to the extent to which many folks in the AAPI community have been drastically and negatively impacted by the pandemic. We have all become aware of the increasing amounts of hate crimes being committed against AAPIs, but this week I learned more about the other insidious ways that elders and young ones alike have been affected by the past 2 years.
Each day this week, we spoke to several nonprofits to better understand the programs they are currently running, and the obstacles they face in achieving their goals. Almost everyone we spoke to mentioned needing to cease certain programs and services because of the pandemic, and the consequences they are seeing now in the populations they serve.
On Wednesday, we spoke with the South Asian Network (SAN) and learned about the difficulties many people in the broader South Asian community are facing. Hina Ahmad from the SAN told us about the many services they provide, as well as the services they are hoping to provide again in the future. Prior to the pandemic, Hina told us that SAN had worked with the elders in the community to provide them with computer literacy classes and group walks, as well as other types of health and nutrition-related informational outreach. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic and public health concerns, Hina told us that many of those programs had to be placed on hold. She talked to us about how the pandemic really highlighted how the elders in our community can so easily become isolated and feel lonely. It was so upsetting to hear the stories she told us about elders calling into their phone lines, just to talk to somebody and feel some kind of connection. I couldn’t help but think about my own family and the sadness we all felt when we couldn’t visit our older relatives out of concern for their health.
The impact of the pandemic was echoed in all the other meetings we hosted this week. Later on, when we met with some staff from the Asian Youth Center (AYC), they spoke about the pandemic’s effect on children. One of the main services AYC provides is afterschool programming for school children. Alex Banh, Deputy Director of AYC, talked about how they’re seeing learning loss and behavioral issues among the students they serve, in large part because they had to spend the last few years learning online and without much social interaction. Alex informed us that they have recently been able to restart several afterschool programs and proceed with their efforts to give these students the academic resources they will need to recover from the past few years and succeed.
Though I had been aware of the impacts mentioned in our meetings on a personal level, it was important for me to hear from nonprofits that serve more people and that have a wider lens to see trends in the AAPI population. Our broader goal in talking with these nonprofits was to see if we could translate their on-the-ground knowledge into potential policy solutions that could address the problems on a systemic level. I am grateful to be some small part of this process of legislative advocacy. I know there is a lot of work that needs to be done going forward, but I found that speaking with these different nonprofits left me nothing but optimistic - I find hope and strength in the knowledge that there are people working so hard to undo the harms caused by the pandemic.
Meeting with District Representative Denaee Amaya from Assemblywoman Blanca Rubio’s office
to learn about local advocacy