Funded by Walmart Foundation, the National Asian Pacific Center on Aging (NAPCA) has partnered with 19 Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) focused community-based organizations across 16 cities from across the nation to deliver our “Healthy Eating Healthy Aging” program to educate limited English speaking AAPI seniors 55 years and older.

Each of the partner organizations established a target for the number of AAPI participants to serve among the multiple ethnic groups, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Samoan, Filipino, Cambodian, Japanese, and English. The project team collaborated with the American Heart Association to develop a workshop curriculum that covered topics on healthy eating, heart health, and nutrition label reading, and delivered a five-hour webinar training to guide workshop facilitators. All training materials, including presentations, flyers, forms, and pre- and post-survey evaluations, were developed and translated into seven AAPI languages and are available online for facilitators to peruse.

Workshops are currently being conducted in-language by trained facilitators and bilingual project staff from each partner organization.  Our goal is to deliver 18,000 hours of nutrition education to at least 3,000 AAPI seniors with limited English proficiency by providing translated healthy eating and nutrition education materials in seven AAPI languages, and increasing access to these materials to 50,000 AAPI seniors.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Diverse Elders Coalition.