The Council’s Multicultural Outreach grant program funds minority-led groups, such as people socially marginalized due to race, ethnicity or sexual orientation, to identify gaps in their community systems faced by minorities with disabilities, and then implement strategies to correct those issues. Penn Asian Senior Services, Inc. (PASSi) was a previous Council grantee that received one of the Multicultural Outreach grants to do outreach and dispel stigma in Asian communities in the Philadelphia area about services & supports for people with disabilities.
Asian families often do not look to outside sources of support for help with providing services for their family members with disabilities. There is still pervasive thought among the Asian communities that people with disabilities should be sheltered and any needed services should be provided by the family. PASSi’s grant project was very successful; providing much needed outreach to people in Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cambodian communities. In addition, through collaborations with two other Council grantees, Self Advocates United as 1 (SAU1) and the Disability Rights Network of Pennsylvania (DRN), they also were able to provide training on self-advocacy and empowerment, and on the rights of people with disabilities to both their consumers and their employees who support them.
While PASSi has been featured in several local newspapers, there is a new article in the New York Times that features their work with aging consumers with disabilities who have limited-English communication skills, and the growing need for more and better services and supports for this growing population. To read more about this, please access the article through the following link: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/us/as-asian-americans-age-their-children-face-cultural-hurdles.html?hp. Congratulations PASSi!