The Georgia Asian Pacific Islander Community Coalition (GAAPICC) will host an important Health Advocacy Training on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 and is encouraging all health advocates, public health and medical students, and interested community members to attend.The training will be held at OpenTableChurch located in Chamblee, starting at and ending at
The theme of the training is “Promoting Healthy Communities Through Action.” The half-day training will be facilitated by the national health advocacy organization, The Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum (www.apiahf.org). The training is being sponsored by Voices for Georgia’s Children and GAAPICC’s lead agency, The Center for Pan Asian Community Services. It will consist of dynamic and interactive sessions focused on identifying systemic health issues that impact our Asian Pacific Islander (API) communities in Georgia, formulating solutions or policies to address those issues, and discussing the different and specific ways we can get our message out through advocacy.“Advocacy is essentially ‘persuasive education,’ and encompasses a broad range of activities and methods of communication.During this training we will educate our members on the basics of how a bill becomes a law and how to address legislative issues, how to write and speak persuasively, and how to build more effective community coalitions,” said Lindsay Romasanta, GAAPICC facilitator.
During this training, GAAPICC will also provide examples of local advocacy campaigns that worked and provide “action steps” so participants leave the training with concrete ways they can advocate for API health issues in Georgia.
“GAAPICC, as a coalition of community-based API organizations, is organizing this training because we realize that helping individuals is not enough – we need systemic change,” said Romasanta.A couple of examples of ground-level and policy, top-level health issues that are common in our community are:
Through GAAPICC and CPACS’s Health Navigator Program, a lay health worker recently assisted a Limited English Proficient Thai gentleman with a prostate cancer screening at a local hospital. Later, however, the gentleman was given incorrect dosage information from the hospital’s telephone interpreter service and was ingesting the wrong dosage of medicine and the navigator again stepped in to help. Did you know according to the Institute of Medicine, poor communication between patients and health providers leads to medical errors that cost about $69 billion every year? We want to advocate for better quality, and a greater number of, linguistically appropriate services at health facilities.
A Korean woman and legal immigrant, was diagnosed in Atlanta with late-stage breast cancer and had to get a mastectomy.However, the woman was denied coverage for this procedure because of a 5 year ban imposed on all legal immigrants before being eligible to receive federal and state based Medicare and Medicaid.Beyond assisting this woman’s direct needs, we need to advocate for affordable health coverage for all persons that live, work, and pay taxes in our State.Did you know that 1 in 3 Korean-Americans are uninsured?
Take Peachtree Industrial Blvd. South Turn Left on Peachtree Rd. Turn Right into 2nd Set of Office Buildings 5976 Peachtree Rd.
The Georgia Asian Pacific Islander Community Coalition (GAAPICC) was founded in 2005 with the vision of combining the assets and talents of the diverse Atlanta Asian American community to form an ideal Asian American community.GAAPICC strives to provide a safe place for open dialogue/information sharing for Asian American communities and those serving our communities.For more information, please visit the website at www.gaapicc.org
Voices for Georgia’s Children is an independent policy development and advocacy group working with the state’s leadership to produce better outcomes for all children. Voices for Georgia’s Children’s mission is to substantially improve Georgia’s low ranking of meeting children’s needs by engaging lawmakers and the public into building a sustained, comprehensive, long-term agenda to impact the lives of our kids in five distinct areas: health, safety, education, connectedness and employability. For more information please visit the website at www.georgiavoices.org
The Center for Pan Asian Community Services (CPACS) is a private non-profit organization currently celebrating over 29 years of serving the diverse Asian American Pacific Islander population with multifaceted needs in the greater Atlanta area. Its mission is to create and deliver culturally competent and comprehensive social and health services to counteract problems faced by immigrants, refugees, and racial-ethnic minorities. For more information, please visit www.cpacs.org
