The NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health (CSAAH) continues to deepen our support of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AA and NH/PI) communities, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, through collaborative, multi-sector, and transdisciplinary national partnerships with academic and community partners, to better coordinate research, training, community engagement, and dissemination efforts.

These efforts expand CSAAH’s capacity to support a continuous, bi-directional exchange of knowledge, skills, and resources with our partners, and advance a shared health equity agenda that recognizes commonalities across AA and NH/PI groups, as well as the need to support allyship to further advance focused disaggregated data collection on their health needs.

CSAAH is based in NYU Langone’s Section for Health Equity.

Forging Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Community Partnerships for Rapid Response to COVID-19

CSAAH is currently engaged in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)–funded Forging Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Community Partnerships for Rapid Response to COVID-19 initiative. The partnership is designed to strengthen a national coalition of AA and NH/PI community-serving partners’ work to expand research opportunities for disaggregated data collection, analysis, and support to better address the impact of COVID-19 in these populations.

The community-engaged research approach used in our Community Health Resource and Needs Assessments (CHRNAs), analyses of primary and secondary data, and data harmonization efforts are a critical component of the Forging Partnerships effort. Data harmonization describes efforts to combine data from different sources and formats into a merged format that allows for comparisons across the standardized data. The goal is to improve the quality of data, increase the utility of the data, and encourage collaborative uses of the data for all audiences.

The Forging Partnerships initiative also spurred the development of a culturally adapted messaging campaign tailored to directly support COVID-19 infection control and prevention in New York City–based Asian American communities. CSAAH and our partners at the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families planned, developed, and created the three-part campaign in collaboration with New York City community-based organizations (CBOs) to ensure the included health information addressed community concerns. Materials from the Forging Partnerships campaign can be accessed through our AA & NH/PI Health Central hub.

Project Firstline

CSAAH community health workers are supporting Project Firstline, the CDC’s national training collaborative for healthcare infection prevention and control. This initiative amplifies the voices and experiences of the diverse AA and NH/PI public health workforce fighting on the pandemic frontline, through in-language infection prevention control webinar training events. Project Firstline is a collaboration with the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum and a national coalition of AA and NH/PI community-serving partner organizations.

New York Community Engagement Alliance Against COVID-19 Disparities

Through the National Institutes of Health (NIH)–funded New York Community Engagement Alliance Against COVID-19 Disparities (NYCEAL) initiative, community-based organizational and academic and clinical research partners, including CSAAH, provide regional support across New York City to advance community-engaged COVID-19 research to improve outreach, vaccine uptake, and engagement of racial and ethnic communities in clinical trials. This effort aligns with the related, CDC-funded Engaging AA and NH/PI Communities in Adult Vaccination (EVAC) effort.

CSAAH has focused on supporting local organizational partners’ existing COVID-19–related community outreach efforts to encourage vaccination through dissemination of in-language COVID-19 and flu vaccine materials. Our team developed culturally adapted recipe cards, translated into Bengali, Chinese, Spanish, and Urdu, which provide information on local vaccination sites. The recipe cards are distributed at community partners’ food pantry sites across New York City.

AA & NH/PI COVID-19 Needs Assessment Project

Through the AA & NH/PI COVID-19 Needs Assessment Project, CSAAH and a collective of national and regional community and research partners conducted a nationwide assessment to evaluate the needs and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on AA and NH/PI communities in the United States. The collaboration aims to conduct timely, policy-relevant, in-language research and is part of a larger multiracial research study that is supported by the National Urban League.

Learn more about the Executive Summary findings from the Needs Assessment Phase 1 report.