Community Events

One of CARE’s foundational strategic pillars involves bringing the community into the Asian health conversation through a variety of different programming aimed at educating the public. CARE will engage our local, national, and international communities through the following avenues.

 Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPI Heritage Month) is an annual celebration that recognizes the historical and cultural contributions of individuals and groups of Asian and Pacific Islander descent to the United States. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are the fastest growing racial group in the United States. 

The effort to officially recognize Asian American and Pacific Islander contributions to the United States began in the late 1970s, and took over 10 years to make it a permanent month-long celebration.

In 1977, New York representative Frank Horton introduced House Joint Resolution 540, which proposed proclaiming the first 10 days of May as Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week. Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye introduced a similar joint resolution the same year. When the resolutions did not pass, representative Horton introduced House Joint Resolution 1007 the following year, which requested the president to proclaim a week during the first 10 days of May starting in 1979, including May 7 and 10, as Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week.

After the House and the Senate passed the Resolution, President Jimmy Carter signed it into Public Law 95-419 on October 5, 1978. From 1980 to 1990, each president passed annual proclamations for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week. In 1990, Congress expanded the observance from a week to a month. May was annually designated as Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month in 1992 under the George H. W. Bush administration with the passing of Public Law 102-540. Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month was renamed as AAPI Heritage Month in 2009.

Each year, AAPI Heritage Month is celebrated with community festivals, government sponsored activities, and educational activities for community. Come celebrate Stanford CARE 2023 AAPI Heritage Month and AAPI Health Awareness Month events:

In this time of rising anti-Asian violence, we are creating a project dedicated to collecting and sharing the stories of Asian-Americans. Tell us two stories: your best and worst experiences as an Asian-American. We invite you to help a loved one share their story, as well. We welcome both written and audio submissions.

We will present these stories as an online gallery and in a podcast. Through our community's collective effort, we endeavor to amplify the stories of Asian-Americans everywhere.

In another senseless act of anti-Asian violence, a white man in San Francisco attacked Xiao Zhen Xie, a 75-year-old Asian grandmother. Ms. Xiao used a wooden board to fight back against her attacker after being punched. Her attacker was bloodied and left on a stretcher while Ms. Xiao walked away. Ms. Xiao is donating almost $1 million, collected from a GoFundMe set up by her grandson, to charities combating hate against Asian-Americans.

Please join us in celebrating the power and grace of Asian grandmothers like Ms. Xiao, with videos and performances from grandmothers and their grandchildren. The performances will be followed by a discussion panel on experiences of generations of Asian-American women.

We will hear from a variety of experts on the role of health in factory work, the oversight of health in labor improvements and labor rights, and why COVID-19 presents an opportunity to rethink our approach. We will also explore research findings in the larger context of global supply chains, inequality, and other social determinants of health. We will discuss the reality of COVID-19 in Bangladesh, its effects on mental and physical health, and the social policy and social safety nets it demands we provide.

This webinar is hosted in collaboration with the  Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, the UC Berkeley Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Stanford Center for South Asia.