Transcription:
"A Just Society" - *Special Episode Bloom 2022*

Heidi Wong: Hello, everyone. Welcome to a special episode of the ICHS podcast, Bloom 2022 edition. I'm Heidi Wong, Executive Director of the International Community Health Services Foundation. And I will be serving as your host today.

The vision of ICHS is healthier people, thriving families, empowered communities, a just society. Today, we explore what a just society means and looks like for ICHS in the context of advocacy. And joining me today are two community leaders, long time activists, community legends, and my personal she-ro and hero, Teresita Batayola and Ron Chew.

Teresita Batayola is the President and CEO of ICHS. Under her leadership, Teresita has led ICHS into becoming Washington state's largest Asian and Pacific Islander nonprofit health center, providing comprehensive healthcare to all those who need affordable care, especially immigrants and refugees.

Today, ICHS serves over 28,000 patients annually in over 70 languages through 11 clinics and service location. Teresita plans to retire at the end of 2022, after 17 years of dedicated service, but will stay busy as she currently serves on the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.

Ron Chew, former Executive Director of the ICHS Foundation, under his leadership over the last 10 plus years, the ICHS foundation raised close to $20 million in funding to support uncompensated care and helped the organization with numerous capital expansion projects. Although Ron has retired from his full-time role in December 2020, he continues to serve as a capital campaign consultant for ICHS' current 25 million capital campaign to build a new senior center and clinic on Beacon Hill.

So Teresita and Ron, welcome and thank you for joining me today.

Teresita Batayola: Thank you, Heidi. Thank you.

Heidi Wong: To kick it off, I'd love to ask both of you this first question. Teresita first, why are you personally so passionate about equitable healthcare? Why have you dedicated your life to health equity for all?

Teresita Batayola: My family immigrated to the United States in 1969. And that was the start of, what, 12 to 15-year deep recession for Seattle, because it was very dependent on Boeing. So it was a one-industry town. And it was a very tough time for our family. And we got introduced to Chinatown and it was just called Chinatown at that time. And my aunt took us to a shop at Wa Sang, which was very friendly to us and would actually let people buy stuff without paying, you know, you can pay for it when you have the money and they had this cash register paper tacked on the wall and that's where they would list who owed what, and then they would just cross it off when you pay. And then, we also got introduced to Russell's Meat Market, which would give out bones for free. And so for our family that's struggling and needing food, that was really a lifeline. It was very informal. But at the same time, I ended up volunteering for one of the founders of ICHS at that time. Head sister, Heide Parreño, was a nun and also nurse practitioner and she was trying to figure out the needs of the elderly Filipino men who were living in the single room occupancy hotel and wanted to apply for a grant and she needed volunteers to interview the men to try and, you know, flesh out her grant application.

So I was really nudged, if maybe forced, by my parents to volunteer. And that early experience really drove home to me that as hard up as our family was, that we had people in the community who were even harder off and without families and on their own and very fragile. So that really started the root of my feeling so passionate about the community, all the voluntourism I did before I came back to ICHS and really feeling that we need to have equity and justice, that people need the opportunity and deserve the respect and the right to have meaningful lives.

Heidi Wong: Thank you for sharing. And Ron, why are you passionate about equitable healthcare?

Ron Chew: Well, listening to Teresita talk about her journey into the healthcare arena, my journey was somewhat similar. It was like a parallel universe, the same locations, Wa Sang Company, Russell's Meat Market, et cetera, et cetera. My parents were both immigrants and didn't have the kind of access to healthcare that many residents in the community today have. My father worked in a restaurant, Chinese restaurant called the Hong Kong Restaurant. They didn't provide healthcare coverage. My mother worked in a bunch of sewing factories near Chinatown and she also didn't have access to healthcare and couldn't speak English. So the system was really a barrier.

I had the opportunity of being the first-generation that go to college or to literally move past grade school. And so during the time I was attending the University of Washington, it was a period of 1970s, early '70s, and a lot of activism. A lot of folks from our community who were children of immigrants or immigrants themselves who came here much in their early years felt that the system should change. And so many of us came back down to the community and began to fight for healthcare, began to fight for health equity services to provide for our parents and our aunts and uncles. And those we worked with, lived within the community so that they could have healthcare. It was just as simple as that. And of course, knowing Teresita, having the opportunity to interact with her in the community, she said, "Well, Hey, come down here and work at ICHS." And I said, "Sure. Let's do it."

Heidi Wong: Thank you both for sharing your stories. Teresita, can you define what advocacy means in the context of community health centers? How was advocacy part of ICHS' mission from the start?

Teresita Batayola: Well, from the very start, advocacy was really key. When Ron said that, you know, in the '70s, people were really engaged and active in making changes. Some of it because of their background. For ICHS, because of the elderly men that I referred to, they had lead really tough lives. Philippines was a colony of the United States, they could come here, but there were lots of limitations in terms of the ability to bring families. And then, once they were here, they ran into anti-miscegenation laws. At the same time, there were Chinese men who had also gotten old, who also because of exclusion laws and anti-miscegenation laws ended up on their own. And between the Filipino and Chinese men having worked jobs that were physically hard, whether it was as migrant farmers in Eastern Washington, as laundry workers around town, or even going up to Alaska to work in the canneries, they really had to just really fend for themselves, even as they tried to take care of families in their countries of origin. And the young people and community activists found that these men were really living in very decrepit conditions, in those little single room occupancy hotels.

Chinatown itself was blighted because I-5 construction had really sliced community. It was really an area of neglect and an area that was vulnerable to big development. And King County, in its wisdom, decided that it was going to bring a brand new stadium, and this was the Kingdome, without any kind of thought or respect for the impact on the community. So it was out of all these factors that students and community activists basically started rising up and saying, "No, you can't do this to our community. Our community needs services. Our community has rights." And it was also during the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. So if you can imagine at that time, you know, people's insistence on their rights, on our rights. And it was not just the Asian-American community, it was also the black community, the Indian-American community, the Latino community, and that was bridging across each other's communities to be coalition. And it was really that time when ICHS got born as ID clinic. So it is stamped in our DNA that we have to consistently show up, stand up and speak out for our communities, for our patients, for the programs that serve our communities and patients and for ourselves.

Heidi Wong: Thank you for sharing about the history. And we know that a lot has evolved. So Ron, can you share about how advocacy efforts for ICHS has evolved over time? And were there any specific efforts that you found particularly significant and what were the outcomes?

Ron Chew: Well, just piggybacking a little bit on what Teresita referred to, the period of the '70s again, when I had the opportunity to go to college at the University of Washington, there were a series of protests against the construction of the Kingdome which was developed in the early 1970s. And I don't think many of us really knew what was going on. It was just we're caught up in the heady period of finding our voices and getting together as Teresita said across ethnic and racial boundaries and unifying and protesting. So the Kingdome was built in Chinatown next to a very fragile community. And people said, "No, this isn't right." And they put together a series of demands.

One of the first things that they talked about was having funding to establish a health clinic serving the Chinatown elderly and immigrant families. As Teresita referred to, there are many, many Filipino seniors who had worked up in Alaska in the canneries. They were in their remaining years, in many cases in their 70s and 80s, still going up to Alaska to work, but they had no access to healthcare. We had also a bachelor generation of Chinese men who couldn't bring their wives over because of the exclusion law. And they were living in pretty grim conditions. I remember visiting some of the hotels and, I mean, they didn't have heat, you know, rodent infested, no refrigeration. They're hanging their clothes out on the fire escapes to dry them. And so healthcare was really central to helping these residents have better lives. And so ICHS was born in the midst of that.

The advocacy part became front and center integral part of what ICHS needed to do, because if you don't advocate for something, you don't get it. And even today, I think people have gotten a little more sophisticated. But unless you speak out about health inequities, the needs of your population, many of whom, you know, as immigrants, they're in a fragile position with a lot of these attacks, xenophobia that, you know, still pervades our society. You know, unless ICHS as an agency speaks out, we would just get pushed aside and lot of the services that ICHS provides today wouldn't be in existence.

Heidi Wong: Yeah, thank you for that. And that's a good segue to my next question, which is talking about the present and recent years. In light of the last two years, navigating global pandemic, increasing anti-Asian violence and other systemic injustices that disproportionately affect immigrant and refugee communities, Terasita, can you share what has ICHS' advocacy looked like these past few years and what does it look like today?

Teresita Batayola: I think we need to go back a little bit before the pandemic. We went through extraordinarily tough times in really fighting a lot of anti-Asian, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti specific religions like anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish religion, anti-LGBTQ where really we were back to being marginalized in a very divisive way. Well, the civil rights movement managed to pass a lot of laws and regulations that really outlawed racism and discrimination. It was back in the open and very aggressively against us. And then you layer the pandemic on and you get into a really serious place where a lot of our folks were afraid to take advantage of services, including healthcare that are available to them, that they are entitled to, that were afraid to be counted in the last census, that were afraid and intimidated in terms of their voting rights.

And so unless an organization like ICHS, which is "legitimate" in the sense that we have an established non-profit status, we get government grants. We are really held up as an institution to be contended with in our community. So unless ICHS as an institution stands up and speaks out, then who else will, right? And in doing so, we do it in coalition and partnership with other similar organizations. And ICHS has also been very effective nationally, not just in coalitions and partnership, but also in being a distinct voice, because we are unique in serving 70 different languages. We are unique in not just serving the Asian-American Pacific Islander community, but in serving other marginalized communities from other backgrounds. We serve East Africans, Eastern Europeans. We serve Spanish-speaking populations. And in being in that space, that unique space, we have a special obligation to be advocates.

Heidi Wong: Yeah. And so many years we are here today, still fighting, and we know that, you know, in order for us to get into the next 50 more years, we need people to step up and come alongside with us. So, why is it important that the next generation take up the mantle of health equity advocacy?

Ron Chew: Well, backing up just a second, one of the reasons I've been involved with ICHS, I retired about a year and a half ago after spending 10 years full time as head of the ICHS Foundation. One of the reasons that I worked here, apart from fact that Teresita asked me and I respected--

Teresita Batayola: Begged. Again and again begged.

Ron Chew: And then, you know, I've mentioned Teresita and she knows this too, I mean, there are very few leaders that I would work for. Having myself been an executive director, you know, I'm kind of picky. So, I do respect Teresita's leadership, and that's what drew me here. But, you know, one of the things about ICHS that's very special is the fact that it's intergenerational. It always has been. It's very tethered to its origins and respectful of that. Whether it's Sister Heidi, who Teresita mentioned, you know, she was one of our anchors. Uncle Bob Santos, community leader, who advocated for the agency over the years. Whether it's Suzi Chin or Donnie Chin, some of the early pioneers, you know, there's a strong sense of history. And in that history, there's been the passing on of knowledge and commitment and the advocacy work from one generation to another. I've aged out into another phase of my life, which Terasita is sort of, kind of in the same realm, I would say. But the refreshing thing is that there are younger folks who have taken up the work and are committed. And, you know, unless an organization rests on that intergenerational platform, the work is really going to be very transitory and it's not going to be as impactful as it can be.

Health equity is an ongoing struggle. It's not something that will be corrected, you know, in a year or two years. And so, I'm pretty hopeful. I remember bumping into some of the new ICHS employees in the final year and two of my tenure here. And some of them would say, "Hey, Ron, my dad thinks he knows you." And then, they mention who their parent was. And I said, "Oh my God, that's so-and-so. He used to be active in Chinese information service center," or "Did you know he was involved in the ICHS when it was the ID clinic?" So there's that really strong connection and, you know, it continues today. And I think it's a pretty special aspect of what ICHS is all about.

Heidi Wong: Do you have any advice for the up and coming next generation of leaders working toward health equity?

Ron Chew: Boy, advice. You know, as an old fart, providing advice to anybody, like will they listen? I think it's patience. You know, change takes a long time. And again, change is not permanent. Change can be wiped away as we've seen in this past period during the pandemic. You know, I encourage people to also kind of work, try to figure out ways to work collaboratively. I think that's been the success under Teresita and other directors, is that, you know, she and other leaders have found ways to pull together teams of folks to work. It's not a one-person superhero, this sort of Mainstream heroic model. I've seen that with Teresita, how she builds teams, finds ways to bridge gaps, to get older people and younger people and diverse groups to work together. And that's how you build a powerful movement, is young people thinking collaboratively, thinking long-term and being patient and knowing that change takes a long time.

Teresita Batayola: I actually feel very happy and very fulfilled in many ways that I see a lot of young people coming into ICHS. I see a lot of young people coming into the community, curious and interested. And some of it, it may be because they do have a grandma or grandpa who immigrated, or they have a friend who has a different background. But then something in the community catches them. You know, whether it's community service here or the Wing Luke Museum, which Ron headed for quite a while or something that they spot as an injustice, maybe a graffiti that's racist. But I really am excited that there's a lot of interest.

And what I would also say to them is get out of yourself. You know, talk to people, learn. I used to talk about, you know, it's important for us to know our history, because we don't want to get it repeated. What we know now that history repeats itself, the kind of hate that we see, the kind of attacks on a whole people, the kind of wars that are getting started or are already in place, history keeps repeating itself. And so what do we do about that history? How do we change it? And we don't change it by just playing video games. We don't change it by just being on social media. Social media, of course, can be very effective in swaying and influencing people. If we're seeing hate being dispensed in social media, if we see alternative facts being dispensed, what are you going to do about it as a young person? What are you going to do about it to influence your friends so that you can have a leverage and be a multiplier for the good.

Heidi Wong: Well, I wish we had two more hours to chat, but our time is coming to a close. But to close out though I would love to hear if you could share your favorite or funniest or most memorable memory of working with each other over ICHS' history.

Teresita Batayola: I don't know if it's just during ICHS. You know, Ron kind of referred to both of us having been around. He's been around the community a lot longer than I have. But I do remember being around him, meeting him a little bit more, you know, post some of the most intense demonstrations. And we also have a shared history because dear friend of his died. I mean, Gene Viernes was assassinated because he was very active in the anti-Marcos movement. And I was in the circle that knew people who are close to him. And so there is that shared experience of, you know, being engaged, also shared experience of having loss and shared experience of having joys in the community.

So one of the things that I will always remember about Ron is running into him at the magazine section in the old Fred Meyer on Broadway. And I would run into him and I was usually with one of my dear friends, Nancy Lim. And all three of us would be reading all these magazines, because we were all broke and not have the money. And at that time, you know, there were no store security. They would just, you know, keep hustling you along. And so we had all of these different cumulative, small experiences with each other over the years that I don't think we ever thought about being friends until it's like we are friends.

And I am so lucky that Ron, when he was talking about how I kept asking him to be the foundation director, I was actually harassing him. Every time I see him on the street, I would cross the street, if it was across. I would beg him. I would tale him. I was like, "Ron, you know, we need you, because we need that kind of dedication." So I am really happy that you're here, Heidi, because I feel like you have that kind of commitment and dedication to the community. But that's what it takes. You know, it's like a lot of little experiences that start to build, you know, that connection that really lasts a lifetime. And I feel I have that connection with Ron forever.

Heidi Wong: How about you, Ron? Your turn.

Ron Chew: Well, let me build a little bit on those stories. As Teresita mentioned, we had number of mutual friends and we would bump into one another at the Fred Meyer store over on Capitol Hill, which no longer exist. But it was in the magazine section. The mutual friend, female friend that we knew was actually on the prowl for a partner and, you know, I would have conversations with her about that. And she says, "Ron, where do I meet? I'm trying to meet an Asian guy. You know, where do I go?" And, you know, I'd pointed out to her, "Well, you know, actually the magazine section of Fred Meyers is not a bad place because that's where I go." You know, they got Car and Driver and all these, you know, car magazines and things, political magazines. That's kind of where I go to read stuff because I don't have money to buy things. So anyway, I noticed she picked up pace. I'd bump into her more often there. And, you know, so, anyway that was funny.

Terdsita talks about asking me to join ICHS. And I remember at one juncture, when we finally agreed that I would come aboard. My one hesitation was, I said, "You know, Teresita, I've worked as an ED and I kind of don't want anybody telling me what to do. And then, Teresita said to me, "Ron, Even if I told you what to do, you probably wouldn't listen to me anyway. So why are you even worrying about it?" I thought about it. "Yeah, she's probably right." Like, it doesn't matter. Like, you know, I'll do whatever I'm going to do anyway.

But the side story I'll share, which actually brought me here to ICHS was, and Teresita was part of that. I live on Beacon Hill and my kids were friends with a lot of the other Chinese immigrant families that were served by ICHS. I remember getting a phone call one day from the mother of one of her kids. And he was having a health emergency, he was having trouble breathing. And so she called me in a panic. And I didn't know much about how to respond other than I could help translate a little bit and stuff. But I called my healthcare provider, which was not ICHS. And then I figured, "Well, maybe they could provide some advice to the mother." Number one, they didn't have the language capacity. Number two, they said there's liability here. We can't provide any medical advice. So I'm freaking out. I called Teresita, I think she was in New York or somewhere. And I said, "Teresita, the patient's in ICHS, they need help." And so right away, she connected me with a Chinese-speaking doc and she got the advice and help that she needed. And that's the moment at which I realized that's why Teresita is asking me to join ICHS. And so I agreed to join and began my 10-year plus journey at ICHS. And I'm grateful that I've had that opportunity.

Heidi Wong: Wow. Powerful story. And that's exactly. You know, the kind of things that drew us, drew all of us, draw all of us to a place like ICHS. It's just been such a special time for me to hear both of your stories and the history, but also inspiration for all of us to get involved and to make a difference in our community. So thank you again to Teresita and Ron for joining me on this special Bloom 2022 edition of the Together We Rise Podcast. Thank you to our listeners and our supporters. And if you'd like to donate to support our work or learn more about us, please go to www.ichs.com/donate.