October 22nd 2008–Bears Can’t Vote, But You Should!

I was welcomed to spend a few hours observing the work of OCAPICA, the Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance (www.ocapica.org) today.  This was a great time and an inspiration. OCAPICA provides culturally and linguistically appropriate outreach, education, and mobilization on civic participation to the Asian and Pacific Islander community in Orange County, California. Specifically, they work with seven different populations—Chamorro, Hmong, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Samoan, Tongan, Thai and Cambodian.

Of their many programs, I was especially enthused to learn of their Young Women’s Leadership (a.k.a “Yellow”) program which engages high school students in civic participation. As they are looking for a project for 2009, it was suggested that they may be able to work with WOCU on a violence against women and/or HIV&AIDS related initiative, which was exciting. Learn more about their programs by listening to the interview where their programs are described on the WOCU You Tube Channel.

I interviewed Tanzila Ahmed and Usma Men about their own motivation for being involved in this work as well as their overviews of the work of OCAPICA including information on their outreach materials and methods, as well data that they have collected and analyzed on the effectiveness of their approach.  I was also fortunate to be able to observe OCAPICA’s multilingual phone banking. As a clear illustration of the importance of the work of OCAPICA, while I was there one of the high school student volunteers from Vietnam was on the phone for a long time with an 83 year old gentleman who had a mailer on voting in front of him and didn’t know what to do with it. He said it was telling him to pay $30 to vote.  Tanzila helped out with the student’s conversation and they determined that it was likely that the document wasn’t his mail-in ballot as he seemed to think and instead was likely a utility bill with a courtesy reminder to vote enclosed. So they helped him through actually determining how to get his ballot and vote.  Footage of the interviews as well as the exchange with the elderly voter can be found on the WOCU You Tube Channel.

Re the subject line of this post, one of the innovative programs of OCAPICA is their MOTIVATE Program with youth. Through this program they had a contest to design a t-shirt for their campaign. One creative Vietnamese youth came up with a design that had a bear going to a polling station with her/his ballot in hand. As the official turned her/him away, they showed the bear going off in the distance and then showed a person walking up. The slogan on the shirt is “Bears Can’t Vote, But You Should!” and it’s written in English and Vietnamese. When I was there the shipment of t-shirts arrived to the excitement of all who were present. You can see the t-shirt in the footage on the You Tube Channel.

After my time at OCAPICA, I went to a late dinner with Jasmine Burnett of the Black AIDS Institute. In an interview she shared her perspectives on issues that are important to her as a woman of color, as well as on the importance of civic participation. Her interview is posted on the You Tube Channel.