Assembly Standing Committee on Human Services

Good afternoon. I'll call this informational hearing of the Assembly Human Services Committee to order. Today, the Assembly Human Services Committee is joined by Members of the API Legislative Caucus to hear about progress on addressing hate in California through the Stop the Hate process.

I want to thank our presenters today for making the time to share the important work they are doing to stop hate in California and support communities. The Stop the Hate program was established after the uptick of abhorrent hate incidents and crimes in the API community.

During the COVID pandemic in 2023 2.6 million Californians directly experienced at least one act of hate and 5 million Californians witnessed at least one act of hate. Although we don't have data back on last year, 2025, it is clear that hate is more rampant than ever.

While President Trump incites hate in this country by posting hateful racist videos of President Obama calling Somali Americans garbage, it is critical for California to continue to stand up against hate. Addressing hate incidents in California is not just morally important, it is also critical for a functioning and successful society.

Exposure to hate discrimination, bigotry of all sorts, impacts educational achievement, economic opportunity and and community cohesion. I was proud to be part of the Legislative API Caucus and our focus for the equity budget when I first came in during the pandemic during the surge of anti Asian hate.

But this program has been so pivotal in serving so many communities beyond the API community, especially for our Latino black communities, LGBTQ communities that have all benefited from this program.

And I think today it'll be important to hear about that investment, since it's been almost five years or so, to hear about what has come about and how that investment has affected Californians. I would like to invite my colleagues now who have joined me if they would like to speak.

And I would like to see if Assembly Mike Fong, Chair of the API Caucus, would like to begin with any introductory comments.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, and thank you for your leadership and efforts in convening this meeting here today and this hearing and for inviting Members of the API Legislative Caucus to join you here today. Proud to be joined by a number of my colleagues as well.

And thank you so much to you and to the entire team here for organizing today's event. We know the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander community, despite long history here in the United States and particularly here in California, has not always been perceived as American. Folks have been asked, where are you from? Where are you really from?

While we can go back in history to cite examples of racism and violence targeted towards the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander communities. The anti Asian hate that was expressed towards our community, especially during the COVID 19 pandemic, with especially racist rhetoric coming out of the federal Administration at the time, was very, very particularly disturbing at first.

That was happening just a few years ago. That was happening here in the 21st century. And that acts of hate were expressed as people were just living their daily lives, everyday lives on the streets while going to and from work, on public transit and even in our schools.

And grateful to the leadership of Stop the Hate and to all the partners here today. We look forward to the robust discussions here today. And thank you so much to all the organizers and to all the community organizations for their leadership and efforts in denouncing hate and a partnership in solidarity with our diverse caucuses as well.

And thanks to the leadership of the former chairs of the API Legislative Caucus and our former budget chair, ... with the equity budget that provided funds to support victims, to document the number of incidents and and most important, to educate and work to prevent more hate incidents and to support the training around those efforts as well.

Look forward to hearing from the panelists today. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, for your leadership and convening us today. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Do any of my colleagues have any other introductory comments they would like to make similar way?

Thank you Mr. Chair, for holding this and thank you to everybody who is here today. Prior to becoming elected as Assembly Member, I worked at a nonprofit, Asian Resources Inc. Right here in town. And we were the recipient of this funding.

And I can tell you that during the COVID times, it truly did impacted the community that we served. Not only were we able to give real information that was in language, but appropriately, culturally appropriate way in which they can understand it.

Because what most people don't understand is that we are not a monolith in the way in which we speak one language. As a matter of fact, the Vietnamese culture, the Vietnamese language, there are very many other different dialects. And the way in which you give the information is different. You don't just, you know, they hear it.

They hear it on the radio or the news, but it's not perceived or sometimes it's not registered the same way. And so it takes a trusted messenger.

It takes an organization that has been around for decades in serving this community that can deliver deliver this message in a way in which our community can understand it, but also trust. And so this funding was so valuable and I would say, dare say saving lives as well too. Not only Protecting, but saving lives.

And so it is so crucial and so important that we put everything we can to be able to get the funding back again to ensure that our communities don't feel like it was a one time deal, because it's never that way.

And I think our API community are always put into that situation where it's like, here's the money, you're good to go, you're done, it's over with. COVID is never going to go away. This is going to be lasting impacts for not just years, but for decades.

And so one of the areas in which I would like to push is that we not only take a look at how the funding impacted our communities, but the fact that while Covid impacted all communities, this funding was shared amongst our Latino communities, our black and brown communities, all communities, LGBTQ community.

It wasn't just specific to our AANHPI communities. And so I look forward to hearing from those who are coming to speak today.

But I want to thank those organizations that are here today who made the time to come out here not only to testify, but to show their support in this and specifically my sister's house, Christine Nguyen is here. Lau family.

Those are the organization which I actually was in the elevator and came up with and told me that they were here. Truly important that you show up and you're here to voice your concerns if this funding goes away or not get refunded, but also that you continue to push for this. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Assemblymember Nguyen, assemblymember Patel.

I want to thank the chair for convening this very important hearing to review the efficacy and impacts of our equity budget. I was a commissioner on the Asian American Pacific Islander Commission, State Commission at the time that this equity budget was created and funding for Stop the Hate was initiated.

I was able to attend convenings through my position on the commission and saw firsthand the impact that this funding had on our community, not only for directly Members of our AANHPI communities, but also in building solidarity with other groups and learning from them and being able to leverage off the experiences of other community groups that have been fighting these fights for decades.

I would like to point out that even in the California vs. Hate findings, we're seeing that race and ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation and religious hate continue to persist in California. While we see in some categories the incidences go down, we're seeing that it's still persistent throughout California.

And it's very important we continue to make sure that our community groups receive the support that they do and deliver it through trusted Sources like Assemblymember Nguyen just pointed out trusted sources that are able to deliver those resources in a culturally responsive way.

So thank you very much, Chair, and thank you to past leaders in the Assembly, including past assemblymember Budget Chair Ting. Fil Ting, assemblymember. Right. Ting, for making sure this budget happened. And it's on us to ensure that funding continues to flow where it needs to go. Thank you.

Thank you, assemblymember Patel. All right, I'm going to invite our first panelists. Come up to the desk, please. And just a bit of housekeeping in that sort is each panelist will have about five to seven minutes to speak, and then there will be questions from the Committee Members after that so we can have a discussion.

But I would definitely encourage you to hit the high points of the things you want to talk about, and then we'll have a conversation from the Committee Members following each panel. And then after all the panels, we will be doing public comments at the end. All right, so whoever wants to go first. Dealer's choice.

Whoever wants to go first. Khydeeja, you can go first.

Can you hear me okay? Yes. Okay. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and Members. My name is Khydeeja Alam. I proudly serve as the Executive Director of the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs. We represent more than 7 million Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander community Members across California.

For over 20 years, we have advised the Governor and the Legislature on how to best respond to serve our diverse and multilingual communities to through political, economic, health and civic engagement. Our commission has 13 commissioners appointed by the Governor, the Speaker and the Senate President Pro Tem. I want to take us back about 20 years ago.

In 2004, in our first annual report to the Legislature, the commission identified an urgent priority to address the perpetual crisis of racial violence against Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs Americans. Our recommendation at the time was to support community based networks to prevent hate violence and respond to the instances of hate.

Because at that time, hate crimes were being significantly underreported. On May 23, 2001 3 Hmong men returned from a day of fishing and pulled into their Chico apartment complex. A white man confronted them, yelling, go back to where you came from. He chased and attacked them, knocking one unconscious.

When they called the police, language barriers stalled communication and no interpreter was provided. Later, the men learned the police hadn't recorded the incident. Only after community outcry did officers arrest the attacker with battery, causing serious injury. The same 2004 report also documented the backlash following September 11, 2001.

In the nine weeks after the attacks, California experienced a surge in hate crimes. At the time, Attorney General Bill Lockyer reported 428 hate crimes in categories that included Arab and Middle Eastern victims, a 346% increase over the previous years, and anti Muslim hate crimes rose by 2,300%.

And even then, law enforcement officials acknowledged that hate crimes were often misclassified, particularly when victims were South Asian, Sikh, or perceived to be Muslim. Two decades ago, we warned that when communities cannot report safely and in their own language, they disappear from the data.

This is why the Stop the Hate program exists, because without culturally competent support, victims don't just suffer violence, they suffer erasure. Fast forward to COVID 19 pandemic during COVID 19, California saw a 107% increase in reported anti Asian hate crimes from 2019 to 2020. The following year, that increased rose to 177%.

But reported numbers still tell only part of the truth. The same barriers we identified in 2004 still remained in 2020 fear of retaliation, lack of trust, limited proficient English, and systematic failures in classification and response.

In response to this crisis, the California API Legislative Caucus, the California API Commission, and the Grassroots organization led the way to respond to this pandemic of hate. With bold leadership, the state made a historic $166 million investment over three years to create the API equity budget.

$110 million went specifically to California Department of Social Services to implement the STOP The Hate Program in consultation with the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American affairs to distribute funding directly to community based organizations and provide prevention and intervention services.

This program was designed intentionally to meet communities where they are, in the languages they speak, through organizations they trust.

Even though Stop the Hate programs was in response to the rise in hate in API communities, the the initiative was designed to serve all communities affected by hate, including but not limited to Black, Jewish, Muslim, lgbtq, Latino, immigrants, people with disabilities and other marginalized communities. The Stop the Hate program is not just about responding after harm occurs.

It is about building a statewide infrastructure rooted in dignity, prevention and community voice. The program funds mental health care, legal support, victim services, community education, and coordinated regional responses. From the beginning, our Commission played a consultation and advising role, holding listening sessions, identifying underserved communities and providing cultural and language access expertise.

We worked closely with the Department of Social Services, whose leadership was essential in designing, implementing and evaluating this program. This partnership gave us direct visibility into how Stop the Hate Program operates on the ground and what its loss would mean. Let me take you to San Jose. There, hate didn't always make headlines.

It looked like an 82 year old Vietnamese grandmother who stopped taking the bus after being shoved and told to go back to where you came from. It looked like a Mandarin speaking father who endured harassment but never reported it because he didn't believe anyone would understand him. Organizations like Asian Inc. Responded with culturally and linguistically competent care.

They provided counseling to more than 170 individuals and facilitated healing circles in Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin and Tagalog and operated senior escort services reaching 47,000 people. And one elder said plainly without the escort program she would have stopped leaving her home entirely. This is not one story.

There are hundreds like it and we still have a long way to go. If Stop the Hate Program funding ends, the consequences will not be abstract. Multilingual case managers and culturally competent staff will be laid off. Language access, mental health care in Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, Khmer, Thai, Arabic and many other languages will disappear.

Senior escort programs will shut down. Youth prevention and know your rights programs will will be cut. Trust based reporting networks built over years will collapse. Victims will return to silence not because the harm stopped, but because help did. We are not speculating. This is what grantees are telling us directly. Hate does not have a sunset.

Language barriers are still systematic. Underreporting is still the norm. This decision is not just a fiscal decision. It is a decision about whether California continues to stand with the grandmother who can finally ride a bus again, the father who can report harm in his own language and the young person who learns their rights before becoming a statistic.

The Stop the Hate program is a promise that when hate targets our communities, California responds with action, not silence. Before I close, I want to thank the Legislature, Governor Newsom, the Department of Social Services and our community partners.

Your leadership made it possible for hundreds of thousands of Californians to access care, report harm with dignity and heal in community. We have built something extraordinary. We have built something historic. But progress is fragile. It is the funding. If the funding ends, we will lose more than programs. We will lose trust that took years to earn.

Today, California's API Commission is the largest in the nation and Stop the Hate program has made our state a national model not just for the API communities, but for all communities facing hate. We are proud of what California has built and we're asking you to help us protect it.

We look forward to continuing this work with you, the Governor's office and our community partners across the state to work to meet hate with resolve, compassion and of course, resources. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much. Now I'll turn over to Department of Social Services.

Good afternoon, Chair Lee and Members of the Committee and the Caucus. My name is Eliana Kaimowitz. I'm the Office of Equity Director at the California Department of Social Services. I am here to give you an overview of the grantee selection process as well as our role implementing and administering the program.

The Stop the Hate Program was created in fiscal year 21-22 to address the statewide increase in hate crimes and hate incidents that disproportionately impacted certain communities such as the Asian American Pacific Islander community. The Department administers the program.

As you heard, with our partners at CAPIA and many of the CBOs across the state, this program seeks to strengthen community safety and well being by increasing access to services for historically underserved populations.

The program funds community based organizations to provide support for hate incidents, victims and survivors as well as hate prevention and intervention services for the communities most impacted by hate. Services range, as you heard, from mental health to legal assistance and community healing.

The program funds three core services direct services including mental health and wellness support, legal assistance, case management and navigation, and referrals for victims and their families. We also have prevention services which include arts and cultural programs, youth development, senior safety initiatives, safety planning and training, and multiracial and multi ethnic community community collaboration efforts.

We also have a third intervention services category that includes outreach and training on the elements of hate incidents and crimes, restorative justice coordination with local government partners, and coordinated regional rapid response.

A total of 180 organizations across California have provided direct services and support to victims of hate incidents as part of this program and have facilitated our prevention and intervention measures. As you heard, the program was funded at our Department through $150 million state budget allocation distributed across three fiscal years.

In fiscal year 21, 22 we allocated $30 million, 22, 23, 40 million and finally in 23, 24 there was an $80 million allocation. To be eligible for the program, funding applicant organizations had to meet several criteria including being in good standing as 501C3s or 501C5 organizations or be fiscally sponsored.

They had to have at least three years of administering state funded subcontracts or sub grants or experiencing experience administering grants or sub grants totaling over 100 million, over $1 million, at least five years of experience providing services to or funding organizations working on the priority populations that we identified such as survivors of hate incidents and crimes, and at least three years of experience providing or funding organizations that provide anti hate survivor services and or prevention services.

Applicants had to meet all of this criteria and were also evaluated on their capacity and expertise to deliver services effectively to meet the needs of these underrepresented communities and regions across the state. We also assessed the regional and programmatic needs of the community to ensure equitable regional distribution of the funds across the state.

Every organization had to prove the track record of serving priority populations and delivering anti hate services. They all demonstrated the organizational capacity for timely reporting on service data and deliverables and ensured quality control measures were in place. Regional leads who are also part of this program were tasked with coordinating services across multiple counties and supporting grantees.

As part of our effort to launch the program, we worked closely with other partners to screen initial applications, manage the selection and review process, evaluated the funding awards, and contracted with external evaluators and technical assistance partners to support grantee activities. as program administrators, the Department continues to oversee grant budgets and expenditures.

We ensure regulatory compliance and compliance with grant terms and we provide guidance for grantees on reporting, funding use and best practices.

We are very proud of all the work of our state and community partners that we have accomplished over the five years in supporting hate incident victims and survivors and preventing and addressing hate in our diverse California communities. Thank you for your time and I'm happy to answer questions.

Thank you very much for that. I'll turn over to the Commission on the State of Hate.

Good morning Chair Lee and esteemed Members of the Committee. If I could just take one moment. I understand that Congress refused to recognize the passing of a true titan in civil rights, so I'd just like to take a minute to bring that to our Capitol because this is how we roll in.

Just loving remembrance of of the late Reverend Jesse L. Jackson. I appreciate you letting me deviate a little bit from my prepared statement, but I'm my mom's son. I am Professor Brian Levin, Chair of the California Commission on the State of Hate. The Commission operates to strengthen California's efforts to monitor, prevent and respond to hate activity.

We have three strategic priority areas provided an accounting of hate activity in the state two develop recommendations for enhancing resources and support for those targeted by hate and three developing recommendations for preventing and reducing hate. And I am happy to distribute to all the Members today some of our recommendations right here.

It's important to note all of our work is evidence based and community informed. We've examined literally hundreds of peer reviewed research studies and consulted with the nation's leading scholars on hate at a time when they are not being invited to the nation's capital.

By the way, we've also partnered with numerous community organizations and heard from the public about what they're seeing on the ground and their ideas for solutions. But what have we accomplished? We've held 20 community forums across California and I've been to every single one of them.

We've convened scholars and policy experts and interviewed community organizations to create policy recommendations for preventing hate. We've developed a training for law enforcement to respond to reports of hate. And we've issued interim guidance for enhancing California's effort to address hate, including recommendations for preventing hate in schools and online.

And we've issued those 42 interim policy recommendations for combating hate in California, which I just referred to. Well, what have we found? Hate in California is at is widespread and at elevated levels. Hate crime data from various law enforcement agencies, which nationally have broken various records, capture only a small fraction of the volume of hate impacting Californians.

To specifically learn from Californians about their experiences with hate, we partnered with our wonderful colleagues in the Civil Rights Department and UCLA to conduct a landmark survey of 20,000 California households. Our data indicates that about 3.1 million Californians experienced at least one act of hate within just one year. These include both crimes and non criminal hate incidents.

About 650,000 Californians experienced hate that was potentially criminal in nature, including either physical violence or property damage. When we compared this to law enforcement data, we found that there are potentially well over a half a million more victims of hate, motivated violence and property damage than and recorded in law enforcement statistics.

We saw that many groups who have been historically targeted by hate continue to see hate at disproportionate rates here in California, including our brothers and sisters in the AAPI NH community. Here in California, we saw high rates of hate against people because of their race, ethnicity, immigration and housing status, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion and disabilities.

An estimated 20% of adults who have unstable housing were a victim of a hate act within a one year period, compared to only about 7% of adults with stable housing. And this does not include all victimizations, just reported bias motivated ones. Even though, unlike some other states, neither California hate crime or vulnerable victim laws cover the unhoused.

We've also been researching how to support communities after they are targeted by hate. We've learned a few things. First, when people are affected by hate, they need more options than just calling police. Indeed, one survey from several years ago showed that 55% of African Americans are hesitant to call law enforcement when victimized by a crime.

Many communities never report hate to law enforcement at all because of distrust, a lack of language services and other reasons. Moreover, many acts of hate that hurt. Communities are non criminal, but people still need support and I would say in this current environment that we're in, people are less likely to report.

Our data reveals that people need a wide range of services beyond just law enforcement. In our survey, we asked Californians about the resources and services they needed after the most severe hate incident they experienced. Nearly one in three victims of hate did not get the resources and services that they needed.

The most common unmet need was mental health services such as counseling. Other common unmet needs were physical protection, help working with police, legal assistance, financial assistance, and validation or acknowledgement that the incident occurred. Beyond the numbers, we've gathered critical community input from across the state about what communities need to combat hate and blunt its impacts.

We've learned that community based organizations play a key role in in preventing hate and delivering culturally aware services to people impacted by hate who may not be able to get services elsewhere.

The resources that people say they need, such as mental health services, legal assistance, help working with the police, and even just validation that an incident happened are exactly what these many community wonderful community based organizations provide. Moreover, we found that providing these resources and services requires a level of local, nuanced cultural knowledge that only CBO's possess.

We also learned that in some cases CBO's service first responders. When hate happens in communities where people do not or cannot report to police, people go to trusted organizations first who might help them with filing reports, connect them with law enforcement officers who speak their language, and access legal resources and other other victim services.

Community based organizations are also critical for building social ties, which research shows can buffer communities from the impacts of hate and other challenges they face. For example, some of the Stop the Hate grantees hosted programs and events to bring community Members together and build relationships.

We learned one grantee who implemented a series of multicultural art pop ups that showcase the arts, crafts, games and cultural histories of their communities. These types of events build community, and research shows that quality social ties can protect people from the adverse health consequences of prejudice and other stressors.

As Dr. King counseled, we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds, he said.

You can read more of our findings and our recommendations in our annual report, which I'm happy to pass our recommendations around.

Among the 42 recommendations we've made so far is our recommendation for outgoing, ongoing investments in resources for communities impacted by hate including California's nonprofit security grant program, California versus Hate, and grants for community based organizations such as the Stop the Hate grants.

These are not static, however, and we intend more completely to examine in future meetings other issues as well as including better protections for the unhoused and proposals for restrictions of gun possession by former hate offenders.

I want to thank you, Chair, and if I can also just give a shout out to former Assembly Member Ting, who was just such, just a wonderful supporter of this work and all the Members of the Committee today who are, as Reverend Jackson said, keeping hope alive.

I want to thank you for your time and I look forward to answering any questions that you may have. Thank you so much.

Thank you much. I want to thank the panelists and also thank assemblymember Suchi for joining us too for this special hearing. Members, I'll turn it over if there's any questions you have for the panelists. Assemblymember Patel,

thank you very much for all of your presentations. Really appreciate the introduction. I have two specific questions.

One is, across the various CBOs that were funded through Stop the Hate grants, did we see any common threads for successful implementation, for metrics of success that could be rolled into some kind of guide for CBOs trying to access grant money and deliver on services like a lessons learned or toolkit, or was it

really unique to the communities and what their individual missions were? Perhaps

I'll try to start us off. I think every region is so different and so the needs of every region were different and also the nonprofit capacity in every region were different. So the services that were able to be offered.

I think one of the strengths of the program has been bringing the organizations together through the regional leads to share best practices with each other. We are still completing our kind of final evaluation of this at least initial round of funding to determine what, what some of the highlights are.

But I think it's, it's, it's really hard to compare apples and oranges. It's very different in each region and, and the services provided were also very specific to each community. I don't know if anybody else has anything to add.

Thank you.

All right, and same thing again is please keep your remarks about six or seven minutes and whoever wants to go first and that way we can have conversation after your introductory remarks. So whoever would like to go first.

Hi, Good afternoon, Chair Members. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Kaley Levitt, Vice President of Government Affairs at Jewish Family Service in San Diego. At Jewish Family Service, we have served the greater San Diego community for over 100 years with innovative and compassionate support.

We provide tools and resources to meet the challenges of today and plan for tomorrow. We empower people of all faiths and backgrounds. Last year we served over 50,000 individuals. We address the complex issues of housing and food insecurity to challenges of aging, raising a family and being an immigrant and refugee.

We also provide care, coordination and support for Holocaust survivors and address rise in antisemitism. In 2019, there was a horrific shooting at synagogue in San Diego. Actually some member of Patel's district. In response to this hate crime, the Jewish community mobilized the best that they could.

Survivors and affected family Members were connected to law enforcement, but there was not a clear plan and coordination to connect individuals to trauma informed culturally competent behavioral health support. This lack of appropriate care is not just an issue with large scale hate crimes. There's also lack of appropriate support for less severe incidences as well.

Exposure from these hate incidents are repetitive. Cumulative trauma becomes chronic, debilitating and the community carries the trauma silently within the Jewish community Members are hypervigilant, feel unsafe in public areas and experience emotional trauma. But sometimes it doesn't rise to clinical diagnosis but still requires support.

Traditional behavioral health systems are not designed to serve many community Members who feel themselves are not clients, do not seek therapy and are in crisis because of an identity based harassment. Across many communities, there is systematic lack of behavioral health support for communities impacted by hate. The Stop the Hate grant filled this critical gap.

The grant recognized that hate is a public health issue, not just a criminal justice one. With the Stop the Hate funding, Jewish Family Service created the Jewish Community Emergency Response Team JACER in San Diego. JCERT is not law enforcement and is not clinical therapy. The program trained 30 highly qualified responders across the county.

They received training in trauma informed care, crisis response principles, suicide prevention and Jewish cultural competency. JCERT created a network of responders that speak with victims after criminal and non criminal incidents of hate. They provide the psychological first aid, grounding and stabilizing support, resource navigation and connection to further community and cultural culturally competent care.

After an anti Semitic incident. We are able to connect people to a caring voice, someone who gets you the fears, your language and someone who you can trust. Someone whose role it is to help you process what happened, navigate next steps and access the right sources resources. This immediate culturally appropriate response is life changing.

YesERT helps people regain a sense of safety, trust and belonging in the aftermath of innocence incidents intended to rob them of those very things. JCERT is a cost effective early intervention. It mitigates more severe and expensive costs later. When hate goes unaddressed, it isolates people, fractures communities and undermines public trust.

JCERT demonstrated that programs like this from the state with state investment can restore safety, strengthen trust between marginalized communities, law enforcement and government. It also reduces the strain on law enforcement and on long term public health care systems. However, JCERT needs further investment to stay active and deployable. But it's a model that's replicable and scalable.

With rising rates of anti Semitism and too many incidents of hate across the state, additional funding is needed to protect Californians. With sustained funding, similar culturally responsive response teams could serve communities across California. Tailored to their own unique cultural context, language and needs.

This program shows and proves that community based responders work trained non clinicians, expands the safety net and coordination, prevents duplication and confusion during crisis. Once built, this infrastructure serves and protects communities and responds to hate with healing, dignity and resilience.

Thank you, thank you very much. Our next panelist.

Yeah, I'll go next. This is Shirley Feng. I'm from Inland Chinese American Association. First, on behalf of CBO organization, I wish everybody here in the Committee a Happy Lunar New Year. Of course. And everybody here. And it's good to see Honorable Ms. Latisha Casio and Dr. Corey Jackson here. So I'm from England Empire.

I just want to say hi to good old friend. So I just want to, you know, emphasize three mission from ICAA. The first one is to promote culture cultural exchange to enhance better understanding and collaboration among different ethnic groups, especially AAPI for the benefit of our society.

That's why we host the Lunar Fest every year for 14 years already. Second, we are actively participating in various community based research projects just to address community identified issues like hate problems and disparities in health care resources to promote social change.

I think, I believe Alexandra has already helped me distribute the 1 in 10 the data published by API data, the research report.

So finally, we advocate for underserved groups such as seniors, youth and people with disability for social inclusion via a variety of community events such as cultural performances, recreational activities like Tai chi and we step, you know, we Especially prepare Tai Chi Clutch and cane for our seniors and they love it.

So canes is not just a tool for assistance but also a kind of a weapon if it can go through the security system to defend yourself.

And educational workshops for mental health to answer one of the questions actually we promoted de escalation skills for seniors also digital anti fraud because hatred as normally hatred in psychological today is a learned behavior. It's not a natural born emotion that we have we have discussed at least it's not in inside out too if everybody watched it.

So anyway I think the behavior meaning that it can be trained. So we offer de escalation workshops and also for seniors especially for online fraud. It normally appears as a very sweet tricks for our seniors. So we do educate them for digital safety. That's it. Thank you.

Thank you. And let's move on to our next panelist.

Thank you. Members of this Committee. We truly. zero thank you. We truly appreciate your time and chance to share about our work. My name is Kate Wadsworth. I'm the clinical Director at center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants. SIRI is an Oakland based CBO with a mission of cultivating healing, advocacy and empowerment of refugee and immigrant communities.

And I truly wish that you could all come to SIRI to see our community center because when you walk in, there's different dancing, there's languages, 11 different languages and 11 different immigrant communities that come together to heal and support each other.

We were granted Stop the hate funding in 2022 and through this funding we've been able to help hundreds of people improve their mental health, decrease loneliness and isolation and increase ability to function in society. I want to take this time to highlight the ways we've been able to help the immigrant and refugee communities.

Our program takes a multi tiered approach. We provide individual trauma, informed evidence based practice using modalities like EMDR and internal family systems, group therapy for elders, transition age and youth and adults.

And we work collaboratively with Asian Health Services and other local Stop the Hate providers to raise awareness of the impacts of hate based violence and and to support vulnerable communities. Now I want to give you a few real life stories that are kind of like qualitative information about how I feel like our program has helped others.

Through this funding, we launched the All About Love Young Women's Group, a nurturing space for young women of color to feel seen, supported and empowered. Grounded in black feminist thought, the group explored how systems of oppression shape their daily lives and how and how hate affects the communities.

Participants bravely shared their experiences, built Deep in solidarity embraced a powerful idea. Love is resistance. Love for themselves, their identities and their communities. Together they practice self care as strength, learn grounding tools to navigate hostility, and develop ways to support loved ones when harm occurs.

The impact reached beyond the circle as participants carried this confidence and compassion back to their schools, families and peer networks. Modeling courage and leadership by strengthening their sense of identity and agency, the group helped cultivate young leaders who are better equipped to interrupt harm, build connection and foster safer community spaces.

In a world that often asks young women of color to shrink, this group gave them a space to expand with clarity, confidence and collective strength.

And in a climate where anti Asian hate has created a real and persistent sense of threat, many community Members carry a quiet anxiety in grocery stores, on public transportation, even in their own neighborhoods. Loneliness and social isolation has been declared a public health concern.

In partnership with Molly Kind of what you're doing A refugee from Laos and a co owner of Tough Love, a non profit martial arts gym in Oakland, we created a self defense workshop, Reclaiming Confidence and Safety, designed especially for elders and community.

It was in Khmer so we were able to have an interpreter, Cambodian and many of our participants. This was more about learning techniques in a time when anti Asian hate has made everyday outings feel uncertain. This is about rebuilding confidence and reclaiming peace of mind.

Across the two workshops, dozens of elders strengthened their mobility, practice, situational awareness, and learned practical strategies to prevent and respond to unsafe situations. The room was filled with focus, laughter and solidarity. The transformation was powerful. One elder shared that she used to walk with her head down. Now she walks looking up.

Right now I feel more confident when I walk outside. Another one said she had been attacked on the street. She said the techniques she taught me made me confident to defend myself by the end. The program's by the end of the program, elders spoke about feeling stronger, safer, and proud of what they accomplished.

In a time when hate seeks to destabilize entire communities, these services restore something fundamental the ability to feel safe in your own body and your neighborhood. For individual therapy, our therapy focuses on self care, emotional regulation, and rebuilding internal sense of peace and safety.

Participants learn tools to calm the nervous system, reduce hypervigilance, and strengthen personal safety awareness without living in fear. Again and again, community Members tell us that they leave feeling more empowered, more connected, and less alone. One Thai client came to us to experience a brutal act of violence that left him hospitalized and struggling with severe ptsd.

He was living in constant fear, hyper alert, unable to sleep, reliving the attacks and flashes that made everyday life feel unsafe. He stopped leaving the house, was unable to work, and his relationship suffered. The physical wounds began to heal, but the emotional trauma lingered. Through consistent trauma informed counseling, he slowly began to reclaim his sense of stability.

Session by session, he processed what happened, rebuilt his confidence and developed practical safety strategies that helped him feel grounded rather than afraid. By the end of the services, is working again. Starting engaging in activities, enjoyed and shared. I feel 98% back to myself. This is my last example. We will get you deported.

That was the message sent to Thon, a Cambodian American grandfather, after he shared his story at a community event. Tom spoke about surviving war and genocide, about losing his homeland, about rebuilding his life in America. He shared the complex realities of immigration and the resilience it takes to start over.

Within days, someone had attended the event, published an article calling for his deportation. His personal information was exposed. The article spread websites fueled hate and xenophobia. Soon the harassments began. Neighbors confronted him with threats. Strangers targeted him. Fear followed him everywhere. After surviving violence decades ago, Ton found himself living in fear once again.

Afraid to go to work, afraid to leave his home, afraid of being reported to Ayes. The trauma is overwhelming. No one should have to relive their worst nightmares simply for telling their story. And through the Stop the Hate program, Thanh found safety and support when he needed it most. He received mental health counseling to process the trauma.

He asked legal consultation to understand his rights and protect himself. He found peer support, a community that reminded him he was not alone. Because of that support, Ton did not disappear. Today he stands strong. He now helps hundreds of others facing similar threats. Turns his fear into leadership and advocacy for his community.

He asked me to use an alias, by the way. But there are many more like Tom. People targeted for their race, immigration status or simply for speaking up. People forced into hiding. People navigating trauma alone.

Given the current anti immigrant rhetoric, we are receiving more requests for services based on the increase in hate incidents and more acute mental health challenges. Now more than ever, it is crucial that we have that we continue funding this work. Thank you for listening.

Thank you.

Hello. My name is Erin Arenzi. My pronouns are she, they. I am the Program Director at Equality California. It's good to see Members of the LGBTQ legislative caucus here. Dr. Jackson, Assemblymember Lee so Equality California is a statewide LGBTQ civil rights organization. We work across the state of California.

Our mission is to bring the voices of LGBTQ people and our allies to the halls of power in California and across the United States, fighting for full justice, health and lived equality for All LGBTQ people. We're an intersectional community.

So when we're fighting for full lived equality for LGBTQ people, we're also fighting for the communities in which we live and work.

I want to start by kind of highlighting a cultural practice within LGBTQ spaces and specifically within trans and gender expansive spaces, which is Transgender Day of Remembrance, which is a tradition that stands back decades now, where as trans and LGBTQ siblings, we get together annually in October to name and remember the people who were taken from our community through anti transgender violence.

I highlight that because the work that we were able to do through this project echoes that kind of cultural, that need in our community, which is one of visibility. Often when transgender people are killed or harmed, the media or police may use their dead name, the wrong gender, the wrong pronouns to kind of talk about this information.

So we as a community have long felt a need to stand and recognize people's full lived, authentic selves when we're recognizing and to make sure that we name them and say who they are.

And so one of the things that we were able to do with this project that I think is so powerful is to, because this project was launched alongside California vs Hate, which it was really brilliant to the state to put that outside.

The Department of Justice, put that in a civil rights space, which is now the California Department of Civil Rights. One of our main goals was to make sure that LGBTQ people knew there is a space you can go to report what is happening to you.

There's a space to go to report harassment, discrimination, and it may not rise to the level of a crime. And maybe you don't want to go to the police. Like many of the communities in this room, we have a long history of conflict with law enforcement that can make that kind of difficult or concerning to do.

So we thought it was really important that our community became made aware that the state of California has invested in civil recourse for people who are the victims of hate crimes and discrimination and harassment. So some kind of concrete things that we did to do that, we developed a couple trifolds.

One is a know your rights trifold that highlights California versus hate, but also highlights other things that folks have access to, including like the victim's access Fund.

And we also have a bystander intervention trifold which highlights, like, here's what you should and should not do if you are a witness to violence, if you're a witness to hate and harassment.

We have in house capacity to do things like that in both English and in Spanish, through somewhat through the Partnerships that we were able to develop because this is such an intersectional grant, because we have these kind of nodes of convening across the state. We were also able to get that translated into seven additional languages.

Resources that are both in language and in culture and LGBTQ specific around hate crimes and harassment are vanishingly rare. So we are really proud and excited to have these. Those are available online on a landing page that we developed.

We've also been able to pull together a convening every year an advisory Committee of eight LGBTQ organizations from across the state that represent diverse geographies, diverse intersectional identities within the LGBTQ community. And we do coalition building and landscape analysis. We kind of ask, hey, what is the biggest need of our community right now?

And we put together, we call it a white paper. That might not be like, it might not fit the technical definition of a white paper, but it's a community driven series of recommendations. Our 2024 recommendation was geared towards school boards and how trustees could help build safer environments.

In the midst of some school boards meetings, public meetings, people can come, they can give public comment, but that was sometimes leading to, that was becoming a source of hate within the community. Some recommendations to school board trustees what they could do to make those meetings safer. This last year, it's all about data collection for LGBTQ youth.

We can't fully understand the impact on that the current climate is having on LGBTQ youth in our public schools unless we're collecting data on them.

So really kind of thinking with our community, how are we, how do we get to the root of some of these problems and how do we equip the leaders in our community with, with what they need in order to meaningfully address those problems? We also did won't surprise you.

We love going to Prides, so we go to Prides and other community events and we distribute those resources. We were able to talk to 3,400 plus people directly and in very like meaningful ways about these resources.

And we reached many, many more through our social medias or online and through just kind of leaving a flyer somewhere that someone could pick up and walk away with. I think when we think about the impact of this grant and of this work, it's been a three year project now.

I think some of the, what you all have been talking about and some of the projects that I've kind of highlighted today really highlight the work of this. It's intersectional our communities. While the types of hate that are geared towards each of our communities manifest differently, they're all rooted in the same underlying problem.

And by being able to get together and talk about these things, we're able to really kind of think intersectionally about this work. We're able to learn more about each other's communities. We're able to learn more and more deeply understand the types of intersectional things that people might be facing.

And yeah, this has just really been incredible work and it's been an honor to be part of this project and I really hope that it will continue.

Thank you very much. I want to thank the panelists for uplifting the incredible work you do and also sharing some of the stories of the folks you work with, too. I want to thank assembler Lisa Calderon for joining us, too. Do you have any questions or comments from the Committee Members? Anything?

No questions, just a comment. I just want to thank all of you for sharing these stories and examples and for the work you do. It's very much needed, especially, especially right now more than ever. And I'm really grateful for all of you.

Well, I have stories to share because I don't know if it's time to share stories.

Yeah, I'll ask a couple questions. Maybe this will be relevant to the course. But so as you understand from the previous panel, we know this is a program that is up for potential reauthorization. We still have to get that. So it's not taken for any granted, especially since you have gone through several years with this program.

What are the lessons learned from your vantage point that you think the Legislature should know to improve, approve the program? Anyone can answer.

I want to go first.

Sure.

So I think for IE for these three years, I just want to quote one of our community members. They said that ICAA is the lighthouse that illuminated the path ahead for them. And we are very proud of their comment. And we consider ourselves as navigators because we focused on P.E.I.

prevention and early intervention because we don't do direct Service with the STH grant. That's why our grant money is minimal. It's 50k per year. But I think we are small, but we are mighty is because I want to share a story now that everybody shared.

So we served one newly immigrant of 42 parents, two kids, two sons. The older one, they immigrated to us a little more than two years ago. So the older son ended up joining the Navy. The younger son is actually autistic, what we call it neurodiversity. So he was bullied actually in school due to. Because he's different.

I think all the hatred came from the feeling of different being threatened or danger. Right so we helped this family, we helped the younger son enrolled into the special IEP program which their comment is that this is the best educational program that they've ever had around the world.

Because US is not the only country they have been to. And we just want to share that for this. They are very grateful for the benefit that they can enjoy in our beautiful, you know, country. So but this is, I wouldn't consider this like a successful story because life is full of uncertainty.

And so the father is actually illegally blind kind of because he cannot drive. So the mother is taking care of, you know, the whole, all the chores like a driver. And also she has to cook, you know, being like a nanny. And she doesn't have any respite service either.

Although they are qualified because the waiting period is over nine months, eight months to nine months. So till today they still couldn't enjoy that.

So what I was trying to say is that the father had a little kind of a condition and then he has to, he, he had to have therapy service, but his insurance is cover California, which kind of lim his choices. So we helped him trying to get a therapy service in ie.

But believe it or not, for anger management and also these issues, no classes is offered in ie. It might be offered in Orange County or LA County.

So what I want to say is that because for Riverside County, I think all of legislators might know that the MESA was replaced by BESA and the majority of the budget goes to housing. But like I presented in front of you the one pager research report.

The AAPI household 1/5, meaning 20% of them, is multi generational, which means it does create mental health problems specifically for AAPI. And I really hope that the AAPI caucus can present that and consider the unique situation in IE. So yeah, thank you for the time.

Thank you. Well, if I can ask again if the panelists can share any experiences from your lens and working through this grant program for us to improve on or to enable you to be more successful. Sure. If anyone.

Is it okay if I go first? I'm very excited about this question. I think it was talked about a little bit earlier, but I think this idea of having small nonprofits that are in the community is critical.

Like for example for Siri, we work with a very specific 11 different language populations and they know in the community to come to us and they know when they come there they're going to get services in their language. They're going to have cultural competency, people from the community, the trusted messengers.

So I think that the main thing I would say is to keep these agencies that can do the niche kind of work. Like the, you know, what you're doing over there and you're doing over there, we're all doing with our communities.

That's so key because a lot of folks won't go to bigger agencies to get mental health services. They just. They won't because they don't have it in their language. And there's not the trust. So that's the biggest thing I would say. Okay, thank you for the question. Sure.

Any other panelists want to.

I would just, I would echo that. And I think you talked about trust and it takes so much time to build trust. And like the three years that this program has been funded, three years is a long time. And also when you're building trust in a community, three years is not very much time.

And I think someone also. So that just like it's ideally, this is an evolution.

I think you said Dr. Jackson, about like, we need to continue pushing the needle forward, not just doing the same thing, but now that we've been here for three years, I think a lot of us have, like, I know there's things I want to do in my program that it's like, if we have funding for this, again, we're going to push this in this direction.

But now we've established this baseline that we can move on. Yeah.

Thank you. One thing I want to echo what everybody else said is there's so many resources already within the communities and they're not being leveraged to the extent that they can. There's even like city and county, not cities or mostly county resources.

They're not being leveraged, not being accessed because people don't aren't going to the communities they trust to get access to these sources. I feel like Stop the Hate grant created opportunities for more people to get into those services and to use the existing services that are already there.

And I also just want to echo quickly what Shirley said because she's talking as well about from the change from MHSA to BHSA is a little bit outside of this. However, so much of the behavioral health resources are already there in many of the communities was connected to some of that funding.

But these programs were able to leverage and continue and extend some of those programs as well. And there's so much intersection between those. And it really needs to continue a lot of that to ensure that these communities have those resources.

Right. And just also to highlight this part, since most of you are also grant recipients from other programs compared to this program. How is the structure of the SOP to hate program serve you all the last three years?

Because you also are recipients of other programs or are there other things that could improve on this side so you have better efficient delivery service?

Question. So we, we got CDC federal funding for three years focused on the COVID vaccination and response and you know, like crisis response, but it's focused on physical health and we try to apply to violence prevention program via doj. But then they requested that we collaborate with a leg, a pro bono agency.

I couldn't find any speaking Mandarin. So I mean yes, there are fundings out there, but there's so many restrictions and then there's no one, no one program like STH stop the hate that really I think care about what our communities, what the CBOs they are struggling with, what are the needs of our communities?

Because the needs of our community, they are not exactly the same. Like even within Chinese community the needs of seniors are different from the youth, are different from the disabled families. So I just, I mean I applauded that but I wish the budget Committee can tailor more into the individual or unique needs of the communities. Thank you.

I mean just from a nonprofit finance management perspective, the fact that this is not a reimbursement based grant, but that it is a drawdown where we receive periodic, thank you, periodic dollars based on deliverable.

It is very hard to understate how especially if you have, if you do a lot of state contracting, not even a lot, but a significant portion, it can actually cause really significant threat to your fiscal stability if the state's behind or if just, or if there's, who knows, you know, or if you have a large payment upfront and then you're waiting 90 days for that money to come back.

So that has been huge. And then I also like the flexibility of the work on this. Obviously we have our core deliverables that we put forth in our grant application. We meet those things.

But I think someone said this really about capacity building and the number of things we've been able to do where we maybe didn't get enough funding to do a project. But because this funding was flexible, we could kind of merge two sources of funding to.

For example, we recently launched legal eqca.org, which is a legal services clearinghouse that offers LGBTQ competent, no cost or low cost legal services. So it's directing people to existing resources. We didn't need to create, recreate the wheel, we just needed a yellow pages.

And so but the funding we got for that was A little slim, but we were able to fully do that work in part because we had a little bit of extra support from this. And then we can also talk about that in our, in our report here that we were able to do that.

Yeah. If I can may add, it's like kind of like minding the gaps too. Especially cultural. Cultural. Cultural acculturation, meaning we accept bicultures or any culture uniqueness that we think we can take into benefit of ourselves. So I think that's a very unique highlight for this program.

Everything they said and geographic too that we're able to work with different folks. Like if they can't access service in our area, we can do zoom and other kinds of services that aren't from other grants and the collaboration with a lot of other agencies so we can best serve the whole community.

I was going to add everything they said, but the collaboration with the other communities and I think I was unaware of this being part of the grant was the convening, the regional convening as well that happened and being able to talk with others going on created a lot of opportunities more for bridge building and coming together with communities that aren't necessarily together and reduces the tensions overall, improves the civil desk course overall throughout the whole entire county.

When you say you weren't aware, you mean initially you weren't aware and then you participated or what did you part of it, but you did. We were able to participate. Absolutely.

We're involved, but just wasn't aware originally with a specific part of it.

Okay, great. Last thing I'll just do a last question before we move on to the next panel is quickly, if this program were to sunset were to expire, what are the programs that real people are going to lose out on should this fail to be renewed this year, we

will still be there, no matter with funding or not. That's the. In short sentence, you know, that's what we.

I will say, you know, on behalf of ICAA, but it's just that like I think she just mentioned that we, we already we are building the capacity but you know, if we let it go that means, you know, whatever we have, the efforts we have been made through the years, the impact probably wouldn't.

So I'd like to change the perspective actually. I hope the Committee can invest in ie. That's why what I'm thinking, because I think IE has so much potential. I mean the data shows that the population shows it. I mean from a business perspective, I think it's the best technique is to invest in the people who live there.

So, yeah, that's my answer.

Dr. Jessica, you want to interject first or do you want them to answer

after you're done answering? Well, I think, like, examples like I gave of, like, All About Love or our different programs, I think we would have to really look at how we would get those funded. I mean, this is how they're funded. And so it's just another stressor on our community, honestly, if it doesn't get funded.

All right, Dr. Jackson, if you want to. Go ahead.

You know, one of the critical things about hate is that in many cases, sometimes when hate arises in one group, they tend to sometimes be left on their own to organize their community and try to fend off and, you know, educate people about their own humanity.

However, we know that the best cure or the best protection or fight against hate is solidarity, and that it's even more important for groups who are not being targeted at that time to be speaking up for those who are.

Has there ever been a time where you have used this program to speak for another group instead of just continuously looking within the own group that you are a trusted messenger for?

I mean, I would say from Siri's perspective, I mean, I'm just going to be honest that with a lot of our folks that are from Cambodia and some of the Southeast Asian communities, there is a lot of hate towards other groups. And there's a lot of discord between African American and Asian communities.

And so we've done a lot of work on that. We've done a lot of education. We brought town hall meetings. We talk about it a lot. We have such a diverse group of staff at our agency. So it's a lot of conversation about kind of the different groups that are, you know, oftentimes targeted.

And so it's been kind of amazing, especially with our elders, to talk about that and to say, you know, to say, like, we're learning, because some of the statements that come out of people's mouths sometimes is really hard to hear.

And so then we have to address that and also do it in a loving way, because this is what they learned. And so, yes, we very much do that. And we are in coalition with lots of other agencies that work with lots of different ethnicities. So that's the way we deal with it.

But thank you for that question. It's a really, really important one.

Yeah, I was just going to say in the coalition space, it's not necessarily in this work that we do, but in the coalition space, it allows us the opportunity to be there, to show up for others when they're the victims of this, and then in return, they do the same.

But this has created more of a platform, I feel like, in San Diego county, for having more of that unity and that cohesion amongst individuals to be there and show up for each other.

I would like to add that. Thank you, Dr. Jackson, for the question. I think the impact came from every little act of kindness throughout these years. So we do homeless feeding. It's regardless of the ethnicity. So we want to contribute to the society.

So that's why we also donated 75k boxes of masks during COVID to the first responders. So I think we want to be a healthy social fiber that will promote the inclusion by contributing whatever we have to the society. This is regardless of race, I would say. Thank you.

I'll also add just LGBTQ folks. We're in every community. And so when immigrants are being terrorized in our communities, that's our community too. So for example, go to Mayday every year, which is obviously a labor movement, but also in a state like California, where we are huge state of immigrants, like that's a huge immigration population as well.

And so I think for us, this work, we always view this work as it's not just LGBTQ individuals within a community. If that community is suffering, LGBTQ siblings within that community are suffering. So it just always has to be intersectional across the way.

And again, I think the flexibility of this work really allows for that, that we can rise to the moment of our immigrant siblings really need us right now. And so our community is being also targeted.

But we have to be working together and to be able to see that fiber and that integration is powerful in this work by focusing on what unfortunately does bind us together right now, which is that targeting and that discrimination allows us to build that solidarity and to kind of transform that into instead visibility and celebration of who we are in the full diversity of our community across the state.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. All right, great, thank you. I want to thank our panelists from our second panel. Thank you so much for coming up all the way to Sacramento. And I'm going to ask that our third and final panel join us up here.

Representing the AAPI Equity Alliance, Asian Health Services and Chinese Forum front of action, this panel will be looking ahead community impacts and anticipated needs.

You. Thank you.

All right, thank you for joining us. Whoever wants to go first. Sure. Remember, just to keep your comments around 6ish minutes or so. Thank you.

Absolutely.

Armand, did you want to go first? Seems you're eager. The eager to go first.

Good afternoon Chairman Lee and Members of the Human Services Committee. My name is Manjusha Kulkarni and I'm Executive Director of AAPI Equity alliance and a co founder of Stop AAPI Hate.

First, I'd like to thank the Legislature, the AAPI Legislative Caucus and Governor Newsom for the historic $140 million investment in a social safety net of 100 and eighty trusted community based organizations to help Californians fight hate.

I'd also like to thank CDSS for being great partners in administering the funds and I'm also grateful for the leadership of the California Commission on API affairs and the Civil Rights Department.

This investment enabled nearly 2 million Californians to receive direct intervention or or prevention services during a time of rising hate crimes where the data shows that hate crimes and hate incidents are still on the rise and our Federal Government is sanctioning hate.

We are urgently asking the Legislature to reauthorize this critical funding before it expires on July 12026 this year my organization, API Equity alliance, is a coalition of 50 community based organizations serving the diverse needs of the 1.6 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles County.

Since 1976, our coalition has been dedicated to improving the lives of LA's APIs through civic engagement, capacity building and policy advocacy. We are proud to say that we are celebrating our 50th anniversary this May.

Because of the breadth and our breadth and experience in Los Angeles county, which has one of one quarter of the state's population, CDSS selected us to be the regional lead. As Such, we support 42 community based organizations also selected by CDSS to provide anti hate programs and services.

In that capacity, we provide administrative support, we ensure compliance with grant requirements and facilitate local and statewide convenings to build trust across our network of partners. I want to share a story of one of our community Members in the region who benefited from Stop the Hate and also that of one of our network partners.

First off, I want to apologize for the horrific language that was used, but it gives you an idea of exactly what our community Members have experienced. So apologies for that. David was getting off a bus when he heard homophobic threats hurled at him from behind. Fight like a man. You're a pussy. You're a bitch.

It was a group of boys who had followed him home. David tried to remain calm, but one of the boys grabbed a metal rod from a bike nearby and severely beat David. He was in a coma for almost one week and suffered from physical injuries leaving him unable to walk.

The mental trauma he experienced resulted in post traumatic stress disorder. With the help of St. John's Community Health Center, David received emergency services from a hospital as well as mental health support and legal services for victims of crime. St. John's also helped David to relocate to a new and safer neighborhood.

This is a horrible example, not unlike many of the thousands of individuals for whom Stop the Hate grantees have provided much needed help to heal from the hate since the program began almost four years ago unfortunately, the number of hate incidents and crimes in Los Angeles county like David's has only increased in the last decade.

The Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, which publishes an annual hate crimes report with data going back to 1995, reported that LA County has seen a long term increase as well as a year over year rise in reported hate crimes since 2014. In 2014, that number was 390 reported hate crimes.

That number increased to over 1300 hate crimes in 2024, which is the most recent data available. This increase in hate, despite the tremendous work of the Stop the Hate Program Partners, is a reflection of the fact that we live in a time when hate is perpetuated by our national leaders on a daily basis.

Acts of hate prevent California's employees from going to work, California kids from attending schools, and California seniors from getting their groceries and prescriptions. Kathy's case, which I will also share, demonstrates this. Apologies again for the horrific language. Chink Ching Chong. This is what Kathy heard every single day at work.

Even at as a manager, her colleagues made fun of her accent and undermined her for being Korean. She felt belittled. She feared losing her job if she spoke up about it. Over time the stress deepened, causing sleep disturbances at night and of course, self doubt. In the workplace. Kathy sought help from the Korean American Family Services Organization.

They provided her with culturally and linguistically affirming mental health care services. For 12 weeks, Kathy's therapist helped her process the discrimination, boost her confidence, and provided emotional support, safety planning and workplace advocacy resources. Four months later, Kathy spoke out against the discrimination she experienced, demanding to be treated with respect and dignity.

Her efforts led her workplace to hold a cultural bias and diversity training for all staff so that what happened to Kathy wouldn't happen to any other employee.

Through the Stop the Hate program, API Equity alliance and our grantees work to ensure that Californians from marginalized communities get the services they need to enable them to return to school and work and enable them to thrive.

As a regional lead, we have hosted quarterly convenings where local community based organization partners come together to share their work and learn from experts.

In past convenings, we have invited the California Civil Rights Department, the California Commission on APIA affairs, and the Department of Justice to share their work and to share specific resources they offer to victims of hate.

Their presentations, as well as others have enabled grantees to guide their clients to report hate incidents and and to learn about local resources. Additionally, we have engaged in significant trust building in our communities that enables us to bring partners together, facilitate small group conversations and enables organizations to refer clients to each other.

One example is an organization whose expertise is with Chinese American communities was able to refer a Korean speaking client to an organization in Koreatown to better assist them I want to end with one last story from our region that demonstrates the long term benefits of Stop the hate.

Students in Mr. B's classroom passed around a school laptop with the words F N. I 'm not going to say those words KKK for life that were carved into the school laptop. It took over a month for one of his African American students to report the hate.

Shocked and distressed, Mr. B emphasized I want this to be an educational moment. He asked the 211 LA Dream center at his East LA High school to support and run a hate crime workshop. The center provided him with mental health counseling and tools to address hate.

They also designed a workshop to help students think critically about the impacts of their words. The student who carved the words expressed his regret openly and sincerely, taking accountability for his actions. After the workshop, students felt more motivated to do more and they created a campaign called Words Matter. Choose Wisely.

The movement even sparked neighboring high school students to organize more dialogue on race and Mr. B thanks the center for their approach in creating learning opportunities for youth and leading a community to grow and be stronger and better together.

As I close I want to just say we are all aware that our nation has faced tremendous challenges over the last year. In early January of 2025, Los Angeles experience a natural disaster with the fires in the Palisades and also nearby communities. Weeks later, our country began to experience a national disaster.

Our friends and family Members have been kidnapped, detained and deported. Undocumented community Members have been removed from their homes. International students have been taken from buses. US Citizen children have been abducted from schools. Sadly, these actions have encouraged some Californians to perpetrate hate, including saying that during the commission of these acts, Trump will deport you.

Trump will f with you. I'm confident that at some time in the future the authoritarian regime will end. I'm hopeful too that hate in California will decrease. But that will only happen if we still have a civil society that upholds the values of democracy alongside diversity and inclusion.

Programs like Stop the Hate and the educational workshops held at the 211 Dream center enable us to maintain a civil society. Stop the hate protects all 40 million of our state residents, including the most marginalized, and preserves our values.

For that reason, we urge the Legislature to continue to invest in this program and and thereby invest in California's civil society. Thank you again for the opportunity to share our community's experience and the work of our organizations.

All right, thank you, whoever would like to go next.

Good afternoon, Chair Lee and Human Services Committee Members and API Caucus Members. My name is Julia Liou. I'm the CEO of Asian Health Services. We are a federally qualified health center with 16 sites in Oakland, Alameda, San Leandro. We have served the underserved community for over five decades.

We provide medical, dental, behavioral health care services to 50,000 patients throughout Alameda county in 14 languages, of which 12 are Asian languages. When the dual pandemic of COVID and anti Asian hate hit Oakland, Chinatown became one of the epicenters for hate and violence. Our own staff, our patients, experienced violence, attacks and racism.

Our patients, our elders, were scared to leave their homes and the news and social media were constantly filled with the disturbing images of the latest brutal attack. During that time, there were no linguistically and culturally competent programs for Asian survivors in Alameda County.

Supported by the Stop the Hate Transformative Grant and Regional Lead Grant, AHS and its partners built a robust system of public health and community interventions.

Combined with systems change initiatives, Survivors of hate received lay counseling and mental health support, resource navigation, emergency financial aid, food deliveries, support groups, community ambassadors, safety interventions, senior transportation, safety accompaniment, leadership empowerment trainings, and so much more.

In some of our programming, over 90% of our clients received access to lay mental health counseling within 4:48 hours of case assignment. This is especially significant given mental health access can sometimes take months on end given the shortage of mental health professionals, let alone those who speak Asian languages.

I'd like to share an Asian Health Services patient story. After suffering physical and mental trauma from a violent incident and hate, Elaine, Chinese elder, came to our AHS community healing unit, what we call chew, seeking help.

Scared to leave her home, she had struggled with isolation and fear and through CHU she received lay mental health counseling, acupuncture system, navigation support and in the very beginning she was very reserved, very apprehensive in speaking up. However, participating in our CHU programming, she stated, I have finally released the harm today.

She is now a trained HS community leader advocating for investments in health care access, violence prevention and language access. As the Bay Area, South Bay and Central Coast Regional Lead HS supports 44 sub grantees dedicated to supporting survivors of hate from Asian American, Black, Latinx, lgbtq, disabled and religious minority communities.

HS provides monthly trainings, capacity building support and covering topics such as communications, financial reporting, conflict de escalation, expanding referral networks and data evaluation. These efforts have strengthened our sub grantees ability to manage state grants and deliver much needed culturally responsive care services and programming to community Members who have experienced violence, crime and hate.

We also supported sub grantees to receive training through our lay mental health Counselor Academy that has actually played a very, very critical in addressing the mental health workforce gaps with culturally and linguistically competent support. Through our collective programming, we've had over 500,000 who've received support. Over 300,000 received prevention services.

100 new community workers were hired across the region, 50 have been certified as lay mental health counselors, 86% developed or strengthened their partnerships with government agencies and 70% have increased cross racial collaboration.

The regional lead model made this government program more accessible, efficient and impactful for places like Alameda County, Santa Barbara County A regional lead and sub grantees successfully organized at the city and county levels to implement policies that protect immigrants facing hate and xenophobia. They increased local funding for community based support and legal resources for immigrants.

They built multiracial, multilingual coalitions of community based organizations. Collectively, our region leveraged over $10 million of funding from foundations and donors and government grants and contracts to support anti hate work. Stop the Hate also provided much more than just direct services. Stop the Hate resulted in deep community transformation through innovation and partnerships.

In Oakland's East Lake Little Saigon neighborhood, Clinton park reflected years of divestment and social neglect. It really resulted in a breeding ground for hate. Storefronts were frequently broken into. Residents were scared to walk by the park. Community Members of all ethnicities and races were frequent victims of hate and violence.

Our Stop the Hate grantee tribe, excuse me, led efforts to transform Clinton park by renovating and revitalizing and reopening the recreation center that was owned by the City of Oakland. Tribes. Community ambassadors were trained in lay counseling. They brought relationships of trust and safety to the neighborhood.

Others Stopped the Hate partners added arts and multicultural programming at the Revailes park and the newly reopened Recreation Center. Between 2021 and 2025, violent crime in Little Saigon Eastlake dropped by 30% even as Oakland Police Department staffing decreased by 10%, which is a testament to the community transformation efforts led by our Stop the hate partners.

Currently, 75% of our sub grantees report concern about anti immigrant hate targeted violence. Several of our sub grantees, including Siri, who you just heard from, are supporting hundreds of individuals and family Members who are impacted by the combination of federal threats, deportation, xenophobia and hate. Support for the STH program is now needed more than ever.

Our Stop the Hate program originated during the rise of anti Asian hate and evolved to increase resources for all communities targeted by hate crimes. And again is now needed more than ever to serve communities under attack. This year our communities will experience the deepest Medicaid cuts in history.

It's going to result in an exponential increase in uninsured along with tremendous loss of access to critical public assistance.

We are now in need of a critical new safety net that can leverage resources, provide critical trauma informed services, care and support while advancing needed systems change at all local and state levels with the deepest relationships of trust and the experience and capacity that it's built with our Stop the Hate funds.

Stop the Hate is well positioned to serve as that new safety net. Having built a very strong ecosystem and infrastructure of social support and care throughout the state.

It is critical now more than ever to continue to invest in the Stop the Hate ecosystem of regional leads and grantees to play a critical and pivotal role in addressing and responding to the historical challenges of our times to protect the health, well being and safety of our vulnerable communities. Thank you.

Thank you very much. All right, Cynthia Choi with the Chinese FORD Action.

Yes, thank you. I want to thank you, Chair Lee and Members of the Human Services Committee and special hat tip to Assemblymember Jackson who came to San Francisco's Chinatown to learn about the history of survival, resilience and the preservation of culture. Community My name is Cynthia Che and I am the co founder of Stop API Hate.

And although I'm not representing the Commission today and the Commission on the State of Hate, it's important for me to list that affiliation. But today I'm representing Chinese for Affirmative Action. It's Member organization and fiscal sponsor of the AANHPI Equity Network, also known as Mosaic Movement.

Solidarity among AAPI Communities it's important to note that we are not a regional lead, but we do see ourselves as part of a greater ecosystem that is about advancing equity and an affirmative agenda. So thank you again for this opportunity. For too long, AAPI communities in California have been excluded from meaningful public investment and decision making.

Even as our communities grow in size and visibility, we face overlapping threats. Hate violence, anti immigrant policies, rising housing costs, unsafe workplaces, language barriers and divestments in schools, health care and transportation. The systems designed to support Californians have not always worked for our communities.

Many elders, families and young people continue to face barriers to services, safety and civic participation. California has historically lacked a coordinated statewide infrastructure to address these inequities in our communities.

The AANHPI Equity Network, known also as Mosaic, was created to fill this gap to ensure our communities are not only included, but mobilize in advancing racial, economic and social justice across our state. Because racism is systemic, so should its solutions.

The Network brings together leading API serving organizations including API Data, API Equity Alliance, AJ SoCal, Asian Law Caucus, Empowering Pacific Islander Communities and Orange County Asian Pacific Islander Community alliance and others in partnership with Catalyst California.

We align with multiracial, existing multiracial coalitions and tables centering Black, Latinx and other communities to advance a shared as well as distinct policy priorities. In essence, our work is to ensure all communities can thrive.

Over the past year we've developed and released a 2026 statewide policy platform grounded in the lived experiences of our communities as well as data disaggregated data and I have shared this document with Alexandria who can make it available to the Health and Human Services I mean sorry, the Human Services Committee Members.

We have also convened statewide and regional forums to analyze racial disparities and strengthen cross community understanding and have built Community Readiness Framework to strengthen policy engagement in areas of our state where there is less infrastructure. We've identified three regions which include the Inland Empire, Central Valley and San Diego.

Finally, we've advanced narratives promoting multiracial solidarity and prevention focused responses to violence.

Most importantly, we have engaged over 100 community based organizations and grassroots leaders statewide through our briefings, forums and consultations and we're now moving into a phase of our work where we're going to be engaged in doing deeper work in the three identify regions that I had named and it's really an effort to build sustained coordination around building infrastructure including landscape mapping, leadership development and identifying regional anchors to support ongoing collaboration.

We know at this time that organizations have stretched limited resources to meet these urgent needs that have been so eloquently identified by our prior panelists. And so really our focus is to try to build long term prevention and policy solutions. Again, as so many of our panelists have articulated, stop the hate funding is critical.

It's allowed organizations to expand services, improve data collection, strengthen coordination and shift from purely reactive crisis response towards proactive policy engagement. However, we know that short term grant cycles and the demands exceeds funding levels that are on already strained organizations, particularly for those that are smaller community based providers.

Through our statewide regional engagement, we've identified some key gaps the need for sustained multi year infrastructure funding, expanded language access investment, targeted capacity building in under resourced regions and continued support for disaggregated data, dedicated resources for multiracial coalition infrastructure building and ongoing support to rebuild community trust and civic engagement.

I did want to note that we are one of the grantees and initiatives that has been granted a one year extension so that we can have the time to do our work diligently and will conclude in July of 2027. This extension will allow us again to do our work very thoughtfully and in collaboration with other affected communities.

Thank you.

Thank you to our panelists for sharing the work you're doing. Do we have any questions from the, from my colleagues? If not, you know, this is a question that I have been asking of many of our panelists today. Should this program be reauthorized, what are the changes that should happen?

And Cynthia, you touched upon this already, so thank you for doing that. But what are the changes the program you think in your mind will help it better succeed and serve our communities?