Welcome to the eighth week of our campaign highlighting essential workers. Whether working from home or within our neighborhoods, essential workers are supporting a strong recovery for those who are too often overlooked, underrepresented, or underinvested in.  

Our eighth essential worker feature focuses on Amy Chen, Supervisor of CPC Asian Family Services. The following snippet is from a Q&A that took place between Chris Kuo of CPC Leadership Council and Amy Chen, Supervisor of CPC Asian Family Services. Asian Family Services is a child abuse/neglect prevention program that offers a variety of services to help caretakers understand acceptable child rearing practices and to keep children out of the foster care system. Over 400 families, 800 children, and 900 caretakers have benefitted from the program.

Chris Kuo, Leadership Council: Could you describe the nature of your work with families? 

Amy Chen, Supervisor of CPC Asian Family Services: Case planning involves 
assessing what each family’s concerns and needs are and then providing services and resources to address those. We work with families that are facing hardships at home and that have an incomplete understanding of appropriate parenting methods. For example, in Chinese culture, physical disciplining of children is considered normal, yet it is unacceptable in modern Western cultures. When immigrant families are not aware of the cultural norms here in the US, mistakes happen. They don't know how to discipline their children using other methods, so they need training and support. We teach them parenting techniques and how to implement things like time schedules, timeouts, and rewards systems. We provide them with educational materials and coach them on how to communicate with their children. A lot of times parents don't understand what’s going on in their children's heads growing up. With immigrants, there can be major cultural divisions between generations as parents may not know how to communicate with their Americanized children and vice versa. Case planning helps build that bridge between family members. 

Share Amy's story using #EssentialWorkers and #AlwaysEssential.

Essential Worker Quick Facts

 Black, Latinx, and Asian people make up
more than 70% of the city’s essential workers.

Human services workers are essential workers.

New York City contracts have not set rates that accurately reflect 
human services workers' commitment to essential work.

All of CPC's staff are essential workers. 

Tweets You Can Use To Share #AlwaysEssential Posts:

Help me lift the voices of #EssentialWorkers. Like and share this post to stand in solidarity with human services workers. #AlwaysEssential bit.ly/cpc-always-essential

#EssentialWorkers risk their health and their families’ health to serve others through COVID-19. As New York begins to recover, orgs like @cpc-nyc will be among the ones helping the hardest hit New Yorkers put their lives back together. Support them here: bit.ly/cpc-covid-19-relief-fund #AlwaysEssential

About CPC
The Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC) is the nation's largest Asian American social services organization. Founded in 1965, CPC aims to promote the social and economic empowerment of Chinese American, immigrant, and low-income communities of New York City.

華人策劃協會(華策會)是全美國最大的亞裔美國人及太平洋島民社區服務機構.成立於1965年,華策會專門為紐約市的華裔美國人,移民,和低收入民眾提供金融權力和社區服務.