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Early in 2020, I began working with community-based organizations in our region to address disparities in COVID-19 response including access to in-language information, vaccinations, rapid testing, and quarantine support. This work, part of a state-wide eleven site effort funded by the National Institutes of Health Community Engaged Alliance, has expanded to address the stress and mental health challenges lay health workers (promotoras) experienced on the front lines of pandemic response, the lack of adequate mental health resources for Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Native Hawaiians experiencing anti-Asian pandemic related racism, and the capacity of community based organizations to mobilize and adequately support lay health workers in a changing policy environment. Graduate students Kesia Garibay and Nhi Le, and Chia Thao, PhD (first as a Postdoc and now Assistant Professor, CSU Bakersfield) have worked closely with me on this study. In the course of this work we identified fundamental challenges in the fiscal relationships between universities and community-based organizations that undermined our ability to rapidly respond to changing community needs. I led a paper , co-authored with academic and community partners, that outlined these challenges and argues for foundational shifts in the ways universities interact with community-based organizations . We contend that CBOs are essential to universities’ abilities to deliver on their mission of relevance to their surrounding communities and therefore should be cultivated as if they were highly sought after faculty.
During my sabbatical, I edited a collection of manuscripts documenting the settling in of the pandemic globally. In production with University of College London Press, Covid’s Chronicities: From urgency to stasis in a pandemic era includes eighteen chapters representing thirteen countries across five continents. The book engages with inequalities in various forms, including those across countries, among minoritized populations, and within and between private and public health services. It explores social stratification and its effects within the pandemic across global contexts, reflecting on the profound, ongoing effects of Covid globally. The multiple ways individuals, community organizations, and Indigenous networks stepped in to address government failings is an important feature. The collection includes a chapter co-authored with UC Merced recent Public Health Major graduate Premjot Saroya and UC Merced PhD Chia Thao, entitled Structured neglect and moral action: Punjabi and Hmong community-based organizations in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The chapter provides in-depth analysis of the integral role community-based organizations played in filling the gaps for underrepresented populations in our region and describes how initial commitments and promised investments in equity seem to have dissipated, to have been forgotten, as time has passed. This form of ‘willed forgetfulness’, this ability to return to pre-pandemic priorities despite the lessons learned about marginalization and inequity, is a privilege of the powerful that enables cruelty.
