Validating community voices and concerns and holding intentional spaces for dialogue is central to improving the civic engagement process as a whole. To help achieve this, we launched the Vote for Wellness Initiative, an initiative funded by the National Council for Asian Pacific Americans (NCAPA) that’s helping Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islanders to get out the vote while centering their mental health and wellbeing this Election year. NAAPIMHA’s Elizabeth Sweet, Community Engagement Manager and lead of the Vote for Wellness Initiative, shares more about the Initiative and ways people can center their mental health for the next six months leading into the Election.
What is the Vote for Wellness Initiative?
Over the past nine months, NAAPIMHA launched its civic engagement work through the Vote for Wellness Initiative, a voter engagement campaign supporting Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) communities to get out the vote while centering their mental health and well-being during Election season. The Vote for Wellness Initiative is made possible through funding from the National Council for Asian Pacific Americans.
The goals of the initiative are to increase voter participation within AANHPI communities by 1) providing voter education and voter registration support to AANHPI individuals with mental health challenges and disabilities and the loved ones who support them and 2) providing voter education through the lens of mental health education to inform AANHPI voters of candidate positions on mental health.
We have been fortunate to host several events, foster community partnerships, and develop resources at the intersection of mental health and civic engagement!
Timeline of Events:
Fall 2023 Highlights:
September 19th: National Voter Registration Day
September 20th: University of Arkansas Fayetteville voter registration and wellness workshop event with the campus multicultural center
November 7th: AANHPI Voting Rights and Voting with Lived Experience Webinar featuring former Pulaski County Arkansas Election Commissioner Honorable Joshua Ang Price x Launch of Vote for Wellness Initiative
Winter/Spring 2024 Highlights:
January: Monthly Vote for Wellness Ambassador Meetings Began
February 21st: University of Arkansas Fayetteville Wellness Wednesday workshop featuring guest facilitator TJ Simba-Medel focused on helping attendees ground their civic engagement, holistic health, values, and sense of community to inform their civic engagement approach
April 18th: Boston VFW Event: Amplify Voices, Promote Women’s Wellness: Elevating Asian Communities in Civic Engagement supported by local organizer Audrey Paek.
What are some resources that could help people center their wellness while voting this election cycle?
Resources developed for the Vote for Wellness Initiative include a Vote for Wellness website, serving as a landing page for the initiative including language connecting the dots between civic engagement and voting to both individual and systems-level considerations of (mental) health and wellness. The website also links to NAAPIMHA’s Rock the Vote partner voter registration tools where folks can register to vote, check their voter registration status, sign up for election updates/reminders, and request an absentee ballot to vote by mail.
Digital voter education and informational resources available for download, include the following that have been developed to be culturally specific and designed for the AANHPI community:
A Wellness During Election Season informational brochure with check-in activities and suggestions for uplifting one’s mind, body, and spirit, currently being translated into multiple AANHPI languages.
A Know Your Voting Rights: For Voters with Mental Disabilities informational brochure with legal information and resources to support those helping someone else or themselves with voting with a mental health challenge or mental disability, currently being translated into multiple AANHPI languages.
Courageous Conversation Guides (adapted from VotER’s physician/patient conversation guides) for how to have conversations about the importance of voting, informing others about voting, and navigating voting considerations in multiple situations and with multiple potential relationships.
Are there any themes that continue to come up in the community spaces?
During the establishment and activities of the Vote for Wellness Initiative, a theme of strong youth engagement was present at the in-person events and among the Vote for Wellness ambassadors. Feedback from interactive polling of event attendees and ambassadors revealed some key insights as well. Specifically, the majority of respondents when asked whether they feel their mental health will be impacted by election season, responded ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’, rather than ‘no’ or ‘I don’t know’. This percentage was as high as 80% in one polling instance.
"The majority of respondents when asked whether they feel their mental health will be impacted by election season, responded ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’, rather than ‘no’ or ‘I don’t know’.”
Poll respondents also reported doing several things proactively to center their wellness during election season, such as monitoring or limiting their media/news consumption, focusing on self-care, and having conversations with friends and family. The overwhelming majority of respondents also indicated that in response to the question “Are you confident you have the resources and supports you need to navigate this election season?”, “yes” or “somewhat”, which is a hopeful sign. Finally, when asked to rank the importance of issue areas from a list of issue options adapted from APIAVote's Asian American Voter Survey, top-ranked priorities across responding groups were healthcare, economic inequality, racism, and gun control, issue areas all very connected to mental health.
What are we reflecting on as we head into November and what is on the horizon for the Vote for Wellness Initiative?
Through our Vote for Wellness programming, events, and community conversations, it has become incredibly apparent there is a need to create space for our communities to process the mental health impact of elections, national and state-level politics, current events/the 24-hour news cycle, and civic engagement.
At NAAPIMHA, we aim to host listening session spaces modeled after the monthly listening sessions we currently host for our National AAPI Empowerment Network (NAAPIEN), our national network of AANHPIs with lived mental health experience and the people who care for them. These listening sessions will take place in the second half of 2024 during the general election season and provide an opportunity for community members and organizers alike to center their wellness during election season. These will be spaces to get in touch with potential feelings of burnout, political disillusionment, election anxiety, and other complex feelings, rather than ignoring or suppressing this reality. This practice of honoring our feelings as part of a wider understanding of what can be uplifting and promote our wellness, as we so often say at NAAPIMHA, promotes the idea that “this too is mental health”.
What's at stake for AANHPI Communities?
As AANHPI communities experience the mental health toll of Anti-AAPI hate, racism, and discrimination, similar impacts on mental health and the well-being of our communities exist in how elections directly shape the future of policy in crucial areas like addressing gun violence, our access to resources like healthcare systems, the strength of our democracy, and our lived realities and safety as marginalized communities of color. In addition, our communities hold so many intersectional immigrant, LGBTQ+, pregnant-capable, disabled, religious minority, and more identities that are often under attack.
At the root of this effort to create space for the full range of processing, grief, and care, is the idea that civic engagement, whether through voting or other means of political participation and activism, can be a form of self-care and wellness promotion. Civic engagement can empower us through our participation to feel a sense of political efficacy that can combat feelings of hopelessness and despair. But sustainable civic engagement must also be actively cultivated and requires recognizing that beyond simply supporting and informing AANHPIs about how to vote, we also need to view and treat civic engagement as intrinsically tied to struggles for our communities’ liberation, humane policy, and fights for justice, which all ultimately tie back to supporting our mental health. We cannot power our movements with empty batteries or pour support into our community from empty cups.
AANHPI communities exist in historical and ongoing legacies of colonialism, imperialism, genocide, caste discrimination, religious persecution, displacement, intergenerational trauma, land theft, racism, violation of self-determination, and systemic oppression and we cannot ignore that this informs our political perspectives. This also underlies our potential sense of interconnection to issues impacting other marginalized populations domestically and abroad.
We need systems that validate us and earn our vote
Beyond getting politicians and political systems to recognize the political power and salience of AANHPI communities as a voting bloc, we also need these systems to make deep investments into our communities that go beyond surface visibility and into the inclusion of our communities in decision-making.
We should be allowed to call out how current systems are not designed for us and failing to support and uplift us. If we do not demand our political systems be both accessible and accountable, we risk our civic engagement work making voters feel tokenized and not authentically represented or heard. We cannot push out singular messaging of “get out the vote” to AANHPIs without acknowledging and holding space for frustrations and growing apathy our communities may have toward political systems that currently seem unresponsive to our positions, opinions, and needs. Exhaustion, at the physical, mental, and spiritual/emotional levels, is common among those with lived mental health experience, community advocates, and organizers who don’t want to be told to simply show up at the ballot box without any hope for material, systemic gains for our communities.
AANHPI key issue priorities and views must be reflected and addressed by our systems of governance. This includes our support for Palestine, which has been resonating with AANHPI students across college campuses and beyond, calls for de-militarization and ceasefire, and strong opinions around the need to tackle the emergency of climate change and other issues disproportionately impacting our communities.
At NAAPIMHA, we thought hard about how to center nuanced, honest conversations around the importance of voters getting in touch with their values and centering considerations of whether certain elected officials may provide more receptive environments for our calls for change rather than thinking of any singular decision at the ballot box as the “right”, “best”, or “good” option. We deserve to feel heard and represented by our elected officials, who should have to earn our vote by demonstrating how their values and issue priorities reflect our own.
Ultimately, NAAPIMHA aims to honor civic engagement complexities
At the same time, we can recognize the role of voting in upholding and protecting the rights and resources of the most vulnerable members of our communities and shaping systems, adopting a harm reduction lens. Another nuance we might embrace is framing civic engagement efforts as both making in-system appeals for better outcomes and nurturing mindsets around the possibilities and power of out-of-system, community-based spaces.
In closing, NAAPIMHA hopes to center an approach in our civic engagement work that holds multiple civic engagement complexities simultaneously. This involves honoring multiple truths: validating the emotional complexity and toll often associated with voting while recognizing the importance of sustained civic engagement. Sitting with our feelings around voting is important, even if those feelings are those of political fatigue. When we identify fatigue, we can then work to address how best to rest and restore. The election process and its outcomes have significant mental health impacts on AANHPI communities. NAAPIMHA invites everyone to join us for our upcoming Vote for Wellness listening session spaces and encourages folks to seek to identify the best individual ways we can center our mental health this election season.
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