Focus Groups Provide Insights on AAPI Experience

Upon completion of the EBF-CPC collaboration on the Voice Your Story Project, EBF convened 2 focus groups with the Service Learners, high school students who participated in the project. The objectives of the focus groups were to explore their perspectives on what happened to AAPI individuals and their communities during the pandemic and whether it was important to capture and preserve this history in order to inform actions to reduce anti-Asian discrimination in the future. As a general summary, the students expressed a loss of the sense of ease and security that they once had. There was a sense of loss of innocence that was present before the pandemic. They all felt it was important to capture and preserve what happened so that in the future, people could look back on this time and learn from these events.