Posts related to Southeast Asian Elders
Aggressive Deportation Policies Tear Family Caregivers Away From the Elders Who Depend on Them
By Mari Quenemoen
Aggressive deportation policies, like those that have been enacted since Trump's inauguration, tear families apart — including elders and the family caregivers they depend upon. Since 1980, the share of households headed by an immigrant has doubled (from 7% to 14% in 2012). In 2009, 16% of households headed by an immigrant were multi-generational, compared with 10% of households with a U.S.-born head. Many immigrant and refugee elders depend on their grown children for support for daily tasks, emotional support, or even fulltime caretaking. In Cambodian refugee communities, nearly two-thirds of older adults have been found to suffer from PTSD, and nearly all of those who survived.... Read More
Sign-on to Protect AAPI Data Disaggregation
By Quyen Dinh
Show your community solidarity against efforts to divide us.
The Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) is a proud champion of the nationwide, community-driven movement to disaggregate Asian American and Pacific Islander data categories to reveal the tremendous diversity and unmet needs within our communities. We denounce efforts by a small faction to divide the community based on fear-mongering and distortion – join us by signing on to this open letter.
We celebrate the historical strides that community-based organizations have made in passing or introducing legislation at the state level for data disaggregation ranging.... Read More
Community Healing and Intergenerational Support: An Interview with Nkauj Iab Yang of SEARAC
May is Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, and we want to use this opportunity to highlight some of the amazing work that our member organizations are doing on behalf of AAPI elders. We spoke with Nkauj Iab Yang, the California Director of Policy and Programs at the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC). When Nkauj Iab was hired in 2016, she wrote a beautiful blog post about her family and her heritage. Now, we talk with Nkauj Iab about her work with SEARAC and some of the challenges facing AAPI older adults today.
What is your role with SEARAC?
My title is the California.... Read More
TAKE ACTION: Tell the Office of Budget and Management that Diverse Elders Need Disaggregated Data!
Did you know? Federal agencies (like those that administer education, housing, and employment programs, just to name a few) are NOT required to count detailed data for diverse communities. Instead of asking whether an elder identifies as "Cambodian," "Vietnamese," or "Marshallese," they simply ask whether a person is "Asian." People who are Puerto Rican, Mexican, or Brazilian are all lumped together as "Latino." And agencies are not required to ask ANY questions about sexual orientation or gender identity — and efforts are even underway to remove those questions from federal surveys that do ask for that information. This means our communities remain misrepresented, left out of policy and program decisions, and under-funded.
But the Southeast.... Read More
"These Seniors are Survivors:" Serving Cambodian Elders in Chicago
This week, Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) Executive Director Quyen Dinh travels to Chicago to talk about the needs of Southeast Asian American refugee elders with the Diverse Elders Coalition (DEC) at the American Society on Aging conference. The DEC is the only national coalition dedicated to raising awareness about the unique needs of LGBT elders, American Indian/Alaska Native elders, immigrant elders, and elders of color.
The seniors program of the Chicago-area Cambodian Association of Illinois (CAI) demonstrates that while many of the needs of Southeast Asian American elders are similar to those of other diverse seniors, they also have very specific needs: culturally, linguistically, and as survivors of.... Read More
They Fought for the U.S. in Laos. Now Many Older Hmong Fight Depression.
by Alice Daniel. Alice reported this story for KQED public radio's statewide "California Report," as part of a Journalists in Aging Fellowship supported by New America Media, the Gerontological Society of America and the Silver Century Foundation. This story was first published by New America Media.
Click to hear the radio report of this story.
Dia Yang is a cultural broker at the Fresno Center for New Americans. She helps Southeast Asian refugees acclimate to the United States.
On this rainy day, she's working with a dozen older Hmong men and women who find life in America really hard.
Yang instructs them in a crafts activity: decorating little paper gift.... Read More
Diverse Elders Speak Up About Aging Needs in Our Communities
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 23, 2017
Jenna McDavid, Diverse Elders Coalition
info@diverseelders.org
Washington, DC – February 24, 2017
On Thursday, February 23, the Diverse Elders Coalition released their new report, "Aging with Health and Dignity: Diverse Elders Speak Up," in a standing room only congressional briefing in Washington, D.C. The report synthesizes the nearly 5,000 comments from older adults and their allies that were submitted to the Diverse Elders Coalition in 2016. These comments and the new report detail the challenges and resiliencies of American Indian/Alaska Native elders; Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Native Hawaiian elders; Black and African American elders; Hispanic and Latino.... Read More
Nothing About Us Without Us: Bringing the Needs of Southeast Asian American Elders to Capitol Hill
Last year, with the help of partners like the Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia (CAGP) and the Lao Assistance Center of Minnesota, SEARAC collected over 400 comments in four languages from Southeast Asian American (SEAA) elders across the country. The comments were submitted in response to a call from the Administration for Community Living (ACL) for input on guidance for state plans on aging, which support programming for older Americans.
The comments elevated the voices of our Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese elders, whose stories are largely unknown or misunderstood by policymakers. Nearly all (98%) Southeast Asian Americans over the age of 55 were born outside the US, and between.... Read More
What Did the Diverse Elders Coalition Achieve in 2016?
In case you missed the December edition of our Common Threads newsletter, here are some highlights from the Diverse Elders Coalition in 2016! Subscribe to our newsletter here, and read on to learn more about what we achieved for diverse older adults this year:
It has been a year of ups and downs for our communities and the policies that impact aging within those communities. This edition of our Common Threads newsletter takes a look back at the work the Diverse Elders Coalition did in 2016 and renews our commitment to supporting diverse elders in 2017 and beyond. Read on for more!
The Painful Struggles of America's Older Immigrants
by Chris Farrell. This article originally appeared on Next Avenue.
America's immigrant community is aging along with the rest of the population, and in many cases, with great financial difficulty.
Some 15 percent of adults 60 and over were foreign-born in 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Older immigrants represent a larger proportion of the elderly in major gateway cities and states. For example, in New York City, they comprise 46 percent of older adults; in California, one in nearly three older residents is foreign-born. Late-life immigrants are contributing to rising ethnic populations in rural areas and small towns in the Midwest and South, such as in Minnesota and Georgia, according to.... Read More
America's Stateless People: How Immigration Gaps Create Poverty
by Paul Nyhan. This article originally appeared on Equal Voice News.
FRESNO, Calif. — They came to America in the 1970s and 1980s as child refugees, members of the Hmong minority in Laos fleeing that country's new communist government and persecution for helping the CIA in its covert war in Southeast Asia.
America held the promise of safety and a piece of the American dream.
Many of them chased that dream in California's Central Valley, slowly, sometimes painfully, building lives in a new country where their language and culture were virtually unknown. Largely from poor rural farming families, they often struggled to adjust to a dramatically different society, with few relevant skills and limited support.
But, they went.... Read More
Refugee elders support each other after a long, difficult journey
by Hitomi Yoshida, with with support from Naw Doh, Shira Walinksy and Melissa Fogg, members of the Southeast by Southeast Community Center in Philadelphia. Hitomi is a long-time friend of the Diverse Elders Coalition, and you can read her stories of intergenerational work with diverse elders in our Diverse Elders Stories Initiative.
Naw Gay Lay is a 77-year-old Karen refugee from Myanmar (Burma). The Karen people are an ethnic and religious minority group that has been persecuted throughout much of Burma's history.
As a young woman, Naw Gay Lay worked in a rice field and began raising her family in a rural village in central Burma. When she reached her mid-30s, the whole.... Read More