API Caucus Programs and Resources

Initiative Categories

Focus Areas

Summary

Anti-racism Learning Community: Established to support Black Lives Matter following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the API Caucus provides monthly meetings to promote cultural humility and discuss culturally responsive practices in education and healthcare settings. Participants raise current professional issues, policies, and actions related to racism, followed by discussions of confronting and dismantling racism through learning, empowering, advocating, and collaborating with one another.

API Speaker Series: Created in 2019, this program provides free continuing education focused on promoting equitable and accessible speech, language, and hearing services for AAPIs. Recent clinical and professional topics include critical examinations of accent modification services, best-practice of bilingual speech and language evaluations in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Vietnamese, lived experiences of Black and Asian autistic individuals, and amplifying Pacific Islander voices in SLHS. All presentations are recorded and archived on the API Caucus website.

Bilingual Assessment and Treatment Resources: Created by caucus volunteers with expertise in various AAPI languages, this initiative organizes assessment and treatment resources for Cantonese-, Hmong-, Japanese-, and Korean-, Mandarin Chinese-, and Vietnamese-speaking individuals. Additionally, the caucus distributes bilingual service provider requests in newsletters and on social media to help individuals, particularly in rural areas, find an audiologist or speech-language pathologist with similar cultural and linguistic background.

Career Panel: Caucus professionals share their stories and advice to help students and job seekers navigate through various hiring processes and to problem-solve their unique challenges, including work visas and proper documentation in the country.

API Caucus Research and Clinical Symposium: This annual symposium is a virtual platform to showcase and celebrate API Caucus members’ innovative research projects and exemplary clinical services.

Graduate School Panel: Caucus graduate students and junior professionals host a panel discussion to answer questions and offer tips and suggestions regarding graduate school application for current undergraduate students.

API Scholarship: This scholarship was established in 2022 to provide financial support to outstanding graduate and undergraduate students with Asian or Pacific Island heritage.

API Mentorship Program: This program was established in 2020 to support students’ and junior professionals’ career development by connecting them with more experienced practitioners and professors in SLHS. The caucus has successfully matched more than 30 mentor-mentee pairs based on their clinical or research interests and linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

API Social Hour: To build a strong community and expand member connections, the caucus hosts several virtual events throughout the year, an in-person get-together at the ASHA convention, and an annual membership meeting. Through these networking events, the caucus advertises opportunities for research, volunteer, and community services.

API Social Media: The caucus showcases members and their accomplishments in the monthly caucus newsletters and on its social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). Every year in May, the caucus celebrates the Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month extravagantly on social media by featuring nursery rhymes, borrowed words, specialty cuisines, taboos, et cetera across API cultures.

For More Information

Contact H. Sheen Chiou at hsinhuei.chiou@mnsu.edu.

This initiative was submitted on May 26, 2024.