Asian American youth find empowerment, healing at LA conference
Asian American youth find empowerment, healing at LA conference
At an empowerment conference in the L.A. Historic Filipinotown district, young people came together to discuss activism, leadership and mental health during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
The Saturday, May 17 conference was hosted by Search to Involve Pilipino Americans’ (SIPA), an LGBTQ+ and women-led nonprofit whose goal is to empower the Filipino American community through health and human services, combined with arts and culture programming. The organization is also planning a new community mural honoring Historic Filipinotown’s legacy this year.
Now in its third year, the free, youth-centered conference was themed “Healing Hope.” Saturday’s event included programs that aim to teach AAPI participants about activism and community healing in the face of crisis, organizers said. There were workshops on grassroots organizing, wellness, and breaking down mental health stigmas within the AAPI diaspora.
Youth participants said they recognized growing discrimination, racism and mental stress that comes along with “the current state of the world,” so they felt the conference was important for people to gather, recognize challenges, and “heal from our collective struggle.”
Beatrice Avanceña, SIPA’s youth conference director, was proud of SIPA’s leadership interns, who helped with conference programming. The hands-on youth internship — which Avanceña said was formed in response to growing anti-Asian rhetoric and reported hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic — showed “the ways in which our young people show an unrelenting dedication to the work.”
“We have interns who organized their own clean-ups in Altadena following the L.A. wildfires from earlier this year, and interns who mobilized their own walkouts in protest of the current administration’s attacks on immigrant families,” Avanceña said. “The growth we see in each cohort of this program comes from their passion for uplifting some of the most vulnerable people in our collective ‘kapwa‘ (sense of interconnectedness). The conference is really just an extension of the work our organization has done for over 50 years: providing progressive-minded young people the platform to amplify underrepresented voices, in the calls for societal change from the heart of Historic Filipinotown.”
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