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Community –based Research Collaboration

Even though Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) are the fastest growing racial population in the United States, AAPI are one of the most underrepresented racial groups in healthcare access as well as medical research to better diagnose, treat, and prevent diseases.  As a community partner for higher education research institutions including UCI Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND), UCSF (Dr. Van Ta Park, PhD), University of Texas Arlington (Dr. Kathy Lee, PhD, MSW) and other nonprofit organizations including the National Asian Pacific Center on Aging (NAPCA),  Somang Society has been actively involved in community-based research to facilitate diversity and AAPI inclusion in medical research to accelerate discovery in an inclusive, representative, and equitable way

Project: Koreans Invested in Making Caregivers Health Important (KIMCHI) (2022-2024)

Project: UCI AHEAD Study Diversity Recruitment Project (2022-2023)

Project: Collaborative Approach For Asian American & Pacific Islanders Research & Education (CARE) Registry for paving the way for the meaningful inclusion of AAPI in clinical and caregiving research across the lifespan (2020-2023)

Project: Korean and Chinese Dementia Caregiving Community Survey (2020-21)

Project: Disseminating SPHERE Korean Research Findings to the Korean American Community (2020-2021)

Project: Diverse Elders Coalition’s Caregiving Community Survey-Korean Caregiver survey (2020)

Community Education and Outreach for the UCI Willed Body Program

In 2018, the number of Koreans in Southern California participating in body donations was close to none. The reason for the low number of registrations was the lack of awareness of the importance of body donations. By partnering with UCI Willed Body Program, we educate and inform the Korean community on the importance of body donations for current and next generations. Every year more than 50% of donation registrations are committed by Koreans.

Community Education and Special Program Grant

The Korean American seniors and their caregivers are mostly first-generation immigrants and are predominantly monolingual. Despite a wide range of publicly available dementia caregiver resources, many Korean American seniors and their family caregivers suffer greatly due to the limited knowledge and access to dementia resources in their native language-specifically, social and healthcare resources.

With the grant support from the Archstone Foundation in 2018-2019, Somang Society has started a dementia education & support program for enhancing Korean American family caregiver’s knowledge on dementia, dementia care, and caregivers’ self-care. In addition, Somang Society has started to develop strategic partnerships with local organizations serving seniors (i.e., Alzheimer’s Orange County, Alzheimer’s Los Angeles, and OC Aging Services Collaborative) and has been successful in jointly building out more culturally tailored programs towards the Korean American senior community.

Projects:

  • Alzheimer’s OC’s Building Korean Family Caregiver Support (2018-2021)
  • Southern California Initiative to Support Special Populations Impacted by Alzheimer’s disease (2018-2021)

Project: Dementia Education and Support Program for Underserved Korean-American Family Caregivers with Limited English Proficiency (2018-2019)

Other Grants

Project: Staff Capacity Development to Better Serve Korean American Older Adults (2021-2022)

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