Health group crowdsources coronavirus resources for foreign language speakers

To bridge the language gap for people seeking coronavirus-related information in their native languages, the Oakland-based Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum has launched a crowdsourcing effort to compile resources about the pandemic in nearly 30 Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander languages.

The crowdsourced document contains everything from county public health advisories to fact sheets about how the virus spreads, instructions for hand washing, and information about school district closures and shelter-in-place orders in Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Fijian, Hmong, Indonesian, Samoan, and more. Language-specific information and resources can be submitted on a Google document.

Kathy Ko Chin, Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum president and CEO, says one-third of Asian & Pacific Islanders across the U.S. have limited English language proficiency and language access has long been a key part of the organization’s work. During open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act, the organization helped build a coalition of community health groups that provided language resources to non-English speakers trying to navigate coverage options, Ko Chin says, helping enroll nearly 1 million Asian and Pacific Islanders in 23 states and 53 languages. That effort is being revived under a broad national coalition of Asian and Pacific Islander organizations to develop a coronavirus response.

Service providers and nonprofit organizations working with Asian and Pacific Islander groups say language is a significant barriers for people seeing information about the coronavirus. There are an estimated 1.9 million Asian American and Pacific Islanders in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro areas. Local organizations are also reporting a surge of requests for help from foreign language speakers filing for unemployment but unable to navigate English and Spanishonly applications.

“Information is coming out so quickly practically on a daily basis and there are not that many resources available in their languages,” says Audrey Yamamoto, president & executive director of the San Francisco-based Asian Pacific Fund. “are really scrambling to meet the needs of clients who are at risk like never before.”