Impact of Our Grants

Grants are awarded to affiliate agencies by the Board of Directors from discretionary funds, often supporting programs that have been overlooked by mainstream funding sources. Each grant recipient is required to send a financial report and description of what was accomplished with the funds. Below are stories of the impact of our grants from reports submitted in September 2010.

Health Care Services

Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center is a free medical clinic that welcomes low income and uninsured Asians of all sexual orientations and is the only agency of its kind in Northern California.  The Asian Pacific Fund grant supported health care for 254 patients diagnosed with HIV and counseling for 35 individuals that need more intensive service to deal with substance abuse, mental illness or debilitating HIV/AIDS symptoms.

Yu-Ai-Kai in San Jose offers the only bilingual program in the South Bay enabling Japanese seniors to live independently at home.  The agency also gives respite care to assist the adult children who are caregivers.  Japanese have the highest percentage of elderly over the age of 75 in the U.S., so elder care is especially important to this community.  A grant supported respite so caregivers could take a break, attend caregiver support sessions and get health screenings for caregivers and frail elders.

Family Bridges provides adult day health care and recreational programs in Oakland’s Chinatown to low income Asian seniors, most of whom cannot speak English.  The agency also helps seniors become naturalized citizens, which yields important benefits such as supplemental income and voting rights.  A grant from the fund supported services to help 230 legal permanent residents complete the naturalization process. 

Domestic Violence

Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco serves victims of domestic violence and human trafficking survivors with emergency housing, counseling, and a toll free multilingual 24-hour crisis hotline.  40 to 61 percent of Asian women report experiencing physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner during their lifetime.[1] Immigrant women also have greater difficulty getting access to service because of language barriers and their lack of knowledge about the U.S. legal system.  The grant provided services and shelter for 48 domestic violence victims and their children.  The funds were also used to help recruit and train 15 bilingual volunteer counselors for the crisis hotline, which receives over 1000 callers annually.  Half of the callers could only speak a native Asian language, making it necessary for the agency to recruit staff who speak 19 languages.

Services for Immigrants

Vietnamese Voluntary Foundation provides employment services to low-income Vietnamese residents and refugees in the San Jose area.  Asian Americans were the only major racial group for whom unemployment worsened every quarter since the first year of the downturn.  One in 10 Asians in California is Vietnamese, yet they made up nearly one-third of all the unemployment claims filed from January 2008 through June 2010.  The Asian Pacific Fund grant supported workshops including, ESL, interviewing skills and job application assistance that resulted in 34 full time jobs for Vietnamese refugees previously living on welfare.

Lao Family Community Development in Oakland offers programs in financial management, homeowner counseling and employment services. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, in 2007-2009 approximately 67,000 Asian families in the U.S. lost their homes to foreclosure, and Asians bought homes at inflated prices in disproportionate numbers. A grant supported financial counseling to over 140 Asian and Southeast Asian homeowners in the East Bay saving 28 homes from foreclosure and securing 14 permanent loan modifications.  

Vietnamese American Community Center of the East Bay offers educational, cultural and social services to Vietnamese seniors and youth.  The center used the Asian Pacific Fund grant to provide shuttle service for seniors, field trips, healthy meals, fitness and wellness activities, ESL classes, senior companionship, and health awareness and disease prevention seminars. 

Cambodian Community Development, Inc. received a grant to support public education programs for Cambodians, including health awareness seminars regarding liver cancer and Hepatitis B. Cambodians experience higher levels of poverty than any other Asian ethnic group with a per capita income 50% lower than the Bay Area general population ($11,434 vs. $30,769).[2] Many Cambodian refugees arrive to the U.S. without the tools and capacity needed to navigate the complicated systems of healthcare and housing.

Youth Services

Friends of Children with Special Needs provides support and life skills training to developmentally disabled individuals and their families throughout the Bay Area. A grant from the Fund supported therapeutic arts and crafts to improve motor skills for 110 Asians with autism, Down's syndrome, cerebral palsy, and other developmental disabilities.

Community Youth Center in San Francisco helps immigrant Chinese youth face challenges of adapting to the U.S. school system and society at large.  The center offers tutoring, employment training, intervention and mental health counseling.  A grant from the Fund provided mental health services to 64 youths and their families who were referred because of poor school attendance or academic performance, anger issues, low self-esteem, acculturation and generational issues with their immigrant parents.

[1] The low end of the range is from a study by A. Raj and J. Silverman, “Intimate partner violence against South-Asian women in Greater Boston,” Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association. 2002; 57(2): 111-114. The high end of the range is from a study by M. Yoshihama, Domestic violence against women of Japanese descent in Los Angeles: Two methods of estimating prevalence,” Violence Against Women. 1999; 5(8):869-897.

[2] Per capita income from Census 2000 by ethnic group