SEPTEMBER 28, 2022
Berkeley City College (BCC) was awarded a $2.5 million, five-year U.S. Department of Education / Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) / Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) Title III Part A Cooperative grant. The funding is granted in partnership with the Laney College (Laney) Asian Pacific Student Success/AANAPISI Project (www.laney.edu/apass).
The purpose of the new collaboration is to enhance mental health services, and academic and student support services for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students, which includes immigrant students, first-generation college students, and English Language learners. This is Berkeley City College’s first AANAPISI grant.
BCC President Dr. Angélica Garcia shared “the submission and subsequent award of the AANAPISI grant is a reflection of our colleges responding to AAPI student voice. My President’s Equity and Racial Justice task force facilitated listening sessions during the spring 2022 semester. During one of those listening sessions focused on our AAPI community, students shared the expectation of not being seen and perceived as being ‘okay.’ The programming in our collaborative grant with Laney will support our colleges to clearly message to the AAPI community we see you, we welcome you, and we will center on mental health and wellness in a culturally relevant and affirming process.”
According to Pew Research, 90% of Asian Americans worry that they might be threatened or attacked because of their ethnicity. Common trauma and anxiety-producing challenges encountered by AAPI students include Covid-19 pandemic fallouts such as prolonged isolation and adjustment to online learning and readjustment to in-person learning; cultural and family expectations such as high family expectations for achievement, education, choice of career; and AAPI stereotypes such as the model minority myth that can create feelings of inadequacy for failing to live up to overly high expectations.
“We recognize AAPI students are not a monolith. The colleges have been making steady progress towards inclusion, diversity, racial equity, and access for AAPI students,” said BCC Associate Dean, Dr. Martín De Mucha Flores, a co-author of the grant application. “This grant award provides us funding to intentionally lift multiple voices and stand in solidarity with our AAPI community. The funding and programming that will come out of this grant will support our colleges to match our commitment to Stop Asian Hate and stopping the marginalization of the AAPI community in our region.
The new grant will fund efforts to strengthen and scale up mental health services, particularly for AAPI students on both BCC’s and Laney’s campuses through the creation of a new program known as AAPI Healthy Transitions. AAPI Healthy Transitions will hire additional mental health specialists and staff and will fund additional professional development and training that is culturally grounded for faculty, staff, and administrators.
Additionally, the Cooperative grant will support both college’s Student Equity and Achievement (SEA) and Guided Pathways goals including retention, certificate and degree completion, transfer to a four-year university, and career and job training support.
Hearing news of the award, Laney College President Rudy Besikof applauded the work of the two colleges and spoke about future possibilities. "We at Laney appreciate our colleagues at BCC, as collaboration, not competition, needs to be the 2022-and-beyond approach in serving our communities, all of which are within close proximity. By recognizing the challenges/opportunities that come with our diversity of cultures and languages, the two colleges will address mental health in an innovative fashion and set the tone for the support that higher education institutions should be providing to our most vulnerable student populations. Laney College is most proud to have BCC and President Garcia as its esteemed collaborators as we move forward in this distinctive partnership."
Laney APASS Director Dr. David Lee said “The U.S. Department of Education’s $2.5 million collaborative grant will turbo-charge BCC’s and Laney’s ability to support AAPI students, English Speakers of Other Languages, low-income, and first-generation students.”
BCC and Laney have several clearly specified goals with this new grant. Including one to integrate and elevate culturally responsive asset-mindset-based prevention and intervention strategies into the fabric of the colleges to create an emotionally safe, supportive, and welcoming environment for AAPI students. Other goals include one to increase the number of AAPI and ESOL students enrolling in CTE certificate and degree programs. Another important goal is to increase asset-based mindset mental health programming for API and underserved students and to provide more AAPI students access to mental health services.
The $2.5 million cooperative grant is a new addition to three previous grants totaling $5 million awarded to Laney College by the U.S. Department of Education’s Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISI) Program, part of the federal Minority Serving Institutions initiative.
For more information, contact Dr. David Lee at delee@peralta.edu or Dr. Martin De Mucha Flores at mdemuchaflores@peralta.edu.
