Founded in 1998, the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (CBCAC) was founded by C.W. Chan to unite five Chicago Chinatown organizations (Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, Chinese American Service League, Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Chinese Christian Union Church, and Pui Tak Center) in resistance against casino buses targeting their community, especially senior citizens. By collectively presenting a case to the Mayor and the Alderman, they succeeded in regulating the presence and marketing of casinos in the community. Recognizing their collective advocacy could aid and improve their community, CBCAC continued working on voter education and registration, as well as census outreach. The Coalition also worked with then State Senator (now State Attorney General) Kwame Raoul to pass the Illinois Voting Act of 2011 to protect racial and language minority communities too small to be protected by the Federal Voting Right Act. As a result, a Latino majority-Asian American minority state representative district with 90% of Asian Americans on the Southwest Side of Chicago was created in a single legislative district. In addition to redistricting work, CBCAC’s advocacy also resulted in increasing Chinese-speaking staff in schools that serve immigrant populations, advocating for community assets, and improving the care for the well-being of youths and elders in the community. Their achievements include increasing the number of registered voters in Chinatown by 400%, increasing census participation by 10%, establishing the Chinatown branch of the Chicago Public Library, and the construction of the Ping Tom Memorial Park Fieldhouse after the original fieldhouse was torn down to make way for the Dan Ryan Expressway. Centrally located in Chicago’s Chinatown at 311 West 23rd Street, the organization now serves the Chinese American community in the greater Chicago area.
CBCAC executive director Grace Chan McKibben, photo by Erielle Bakkum
“The core purpose of our organization is civic engagement and civic participation,” says Grace Chan McKibben, who first served the CBCAC in 2010 leading census outreach for Chinatown and Bridgeport and public policy-related campaigns while working as director of administration and deputy director of the Chinese American Service League. Appointed the first executive director of the CBCAC in 2019, she has developed the infrastructure and sustainability of the organization, which now has 7 full time staff. “We work to get people engaged and, from there, we can talk about policy issues or voting or participating in civic and public affairs. We want people to be able to advocate for themselves and to be able to participate in decisions about their own well-being or about improving the community.”
To support their aim of effecting policy and encouraging civic engagement, CBCAC collaborates with researchers to gain information on shared interests. “As an organization, we are open to collaborating with research partners. We work to understand what researchers need in order to get the information they want, and use the opportunity to gain knowledge that we might not have,” says Chan McKibben. CBCAC has previously partnered on projects pertaining to urban planning and health disparities and is currently participating in an Asian Health Coalition study that aims to improve the quality of language translation in healthcare. CBCAC is also an active member of the Pan Asian Voter Empowerment Coalition (PAVE), which is currently focused on improving language access at the state level.
What CBCAC has learned from these partnerships has helped improve the health, well-being, and economic growth of their community. “We’ve participated in several studies on the characteristics of small businesses and the characteristics of people that are visiting Chinatown in order to help the small businesses shape their strategies and their outreach,” Chan McKibben added. “During COVID, we partnered with DePaul University on a Chinatown COVID needs survey from which we were able to see that many older people experienced loneliness, isolation, and food insecurity, and we were able to get some information about why people may be resistant to getting the vaccine. We were able to use some of that information to change messaging and promotional techniques.”
Recently, the CBCAC began partnering with C3EN Pilot Awardee Li-Ting Longcoy on her project, “Development of a Culturally Tailored Resilience-Building Intervention to Facilitate Advance Care Planning Discussions Between Chinese American Patients and Their Family Caregivers.” A postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Biobehavioral Nursing at UIC, Longcoy studies hospice and palliative care. “Due to low acculturation and other barriers with healthcare providers, not many Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, or immigrants know about advance directives or are admitted to hospice care,” she explained. Instead, they often undergo costly and aggressive treatments that may not improve their quality or length of life. Longcoy’s project aims to develop an intervention to help Chinese Americans discuss advance care planning with their families and caregivers.
“I was fascinated because it is taboo in Chinese culture to talk about death or talk about planning for death,” says Chan McKibben. To address the topic sensitively, Chan McKibben and Longcoy worked together to develop a workshop to introduce advance directives to elders in the community that was hosted by the CBCAC on March 26, 2024. “The first workshop was overwhelmingly successful,” says Chan McKibben. “We were thinking, ‘Oh, we’ll open up our office, which is not very big, and maybe 15 people will come–but once we started spreading the word, many people were interested and open about asking questions.” Longcoy shared a booklet with five questions on advance care planning with participants. “The first step is asking, ‘Do you have someone that you can trust that can make medical decisions for you, and have you discussed your wishes with them?’”
C3EN Pilot Awardee Li-Ting Longcoy leads an advance care planning workshop at CBCAC on March 26, 2024
After the workshop, participants asked Longcoy for more opportunities to learn about advance care planning and directives. “Now I’m planning to have a smaller workshop because they told me that they want to fill out advance directives but they don’t know how. They asked me to guide them step by step in filling out the directives,” she says. “Eventually I will have a focus group with them to find out if they have any barriers or any unexpected issues with their family caregivers.”
“I think this is just the beginning,” says Chan McKibben. “Folks were open to what Li-Ting had to say. They took the booklet, and they’re going to go home and study it and talk to their family members. I was encouraged that there’s interest. People want to talk about these difficult topics but don’t have a good way to start. They need a framework and a safe space.”
Providing safe spaces for people to share and learn, such as the collaboration with Longcoy’s advance care planning project, is part of CBCAC’s ongoing work of fostering community. “Our youth-led empowerment program provides a safe space for high school youth to talk about race, racism, and LGBTQ identification which they might not be able to talk to their parents about. In the same way, we are opening up space for older people to talk about things that they don’t feel comfortable talking to their peers about and giving them permission to normalize it,” says Chan McKibben. “We want to remove language and cultural barriers for people. Particularly with older adults that predominantly speak Cantonese, Mandarin, or Toisan, that includes speaking the languages they most prefer to remove barriers to getting information. Our general goal is building a stronger, more vibrant Chinese American and Asian-American community in Chinatown and the surrounding area, particularly for people who have difficulties interacting with government and mainstream systems who may feel powerless to get what they need.”
CBCAC providing free COVID-19 testing in 2020. Photo by Wenyan Wang
CBCAC redistricting rally in 2021 to advocate for a majority Asian ward. Photo by Coral Wu
Main image: CBCAC redistricting rally in 2021 to advocate for a majority Asian ward. Photo by Coral Wu.
Additional images by Irene Hsiao.