From left to right: Lisa, Shuk Yee, Sui Hang, Yolanda with their caretakers
 
Started in August of 1996, Individualized Residential Alternatives (IRA) serves four clients with mental disabilities within a residence in Elmhurst, Queens. The clients: Sui Hang, Shuk Yee, Yolanda and Lisa, are all Chinese-American women in their thirties and forties who have mental disabilities such as down syndrome, mental retardation and cerebral palsy. Their parents are too aged to care for them and each person has been living within the IRA residence since IRA began.  Individualized Residential Alternatives is a little known program that is part of the CPC Queens Branch.
 
IRA has staff with Sui Hang, Shuk Yee, Yolanda and Lisa twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. All staff are trained in CPR, First Aid, Approved Medication Administration Personnel (AMAP), and Strategy Crisis Intervention Protection (SCIP). Programs like IRA are very rare - more intensive settings are run by the government and usually are not culturally competent. Within  IRA staff participate in fun cultural activities such as celebrating Lunar New Year and eating Chinese food.  Most importantly, staff can communicate well with the clients because they can speak English and either Mandarin or Cantonese.
 
Since the staff work within a home-environment and spend so much time with clients, they know the needs and personality of each and feel like they are caring for family members. IRA clients are close to the staff and each other because they have been living together for over ten years. Sui said through her speech device, "I love Yolanda (another IRA client), she's such a great friend."
 
IRA encourages families to maintain a connection and for clients to be as independent as possible. Families call and visit on holidays, birthdays, and sometimes just to bring home-cooked meals to their loved ones. Clients have different levels of functionality but all are encouraged to be as autonomous as possible by doing their own laundry and making their own decisions, such as choosing their meals when they eat out each Friday, purchasing their own clothes, and deciding where they should go for their Sunday outing.  
 
Yolanda, Sui Hang, Shuk Yee, and Lisa go to school Monday - Friday from 9am to 3pm where they learn social skills, money management and attend physical and speech therapy. Yolanda, one of the clients who communicates very well verbally, was promoted by her teacher to train her peers for volunteer work. Outside of school, Sui has a job shredding papers for a psychologist and cleaning tables in a nursing home cafeteria.
 
Yilin Chen, the Director of IRA, says, "This population faces a lot of discrimination. Although they can function with proper training and will not harm anyone, a lot of people stare and are frightened by people with disabilities." People within this residential part of Elmhurst have made many complaints  over the years of IRA's presence in the neighborhood. To this day, some residents still resent having IRA in their neighborhood.
 
IRA tries to combat this social stigma through volunteer work within the neighborhood at community centers and nursing homes to show that people with disabilities are normal and a part of the community. 

 

This year's Family Day Fair hosted by CPC is a Community Resource Fair offering the residents of the local community the ability to get in touch with the local resources. This year's fair had raffle games, hula contests, a special face-changing show and of course, the free health screenings offered on site. It was attended by children, parents and grandparents. Everyone who participated in the fair experienced a day of fun and games.

Community Service staff who put together the successful fair!

 

Connecting the Fujianese Community

In 2008, CPC initiated Project COPE (Community Outreach & Public Education) to outreach specifically to the growing Fujianese community, and to raise greater awareness within this community about benefits and social services that are available to them.  Within the past year, Project COPE held 25 workshops and has served over 1,300 Fujianese community members through workshops and community events. 

Project COPE's mission is two-fold. Not only was the program tasked to outreach to the growing Fujianese population but it also offered a way for students and other community members to obtain information and knowledge about the Fujianese  community and their specific culture. As a result, the community's response to CPC's targeted Fujianese outreach has been immensely positive.  For the first time, Fujianese were able to participate in events that were specifically centered in their neighborhood and information delivered in their native dialect.  Thrilled to enjoy both fun and resourceful events, participants expressed their desire to participate in similar events on a monthly basis.  As such, CPC will continue to explore innovative ways to expand its services in scope and frequency while staying abreast on the changing needs of the community.  
 

Project COPE participants with Paul Chan, Project COPE director and Rain Zheng, Project COPE community organizer

Project COPE's activities and partnerships are targeted across different age groups bringing them diverse activities and educational opportunities.  Workshop topics were wide-ranging, including mental health, financial literacy, tax claims, legal issues, health concerns such as the swine flu, government entitlement/benefits, parenting skills and resources and more. Project COPE has also conducted educational and acculturation workshops.  One was targeted to working males on how to start their own business through obtaining finance and loans, while another targeted stay-at-home moms to educate them about parenting skills and raising their children in their new and different cultural environment in the United States.
 
Opportunities for social support, and interactions were also part of the outreach efforts.  Project COPE hosted an Independence Day dance party celebration targeted towards older adults.  Folks learned through role playing -- the men learned to ask ladies to dance, and ladies gave different responses under different scenarios.  Participants also learned how to dance to western-style music and enjoyed different styled foods adding to the overall fun and social learning experience.
 
Most recently, Project COPE hosted a film screening and awards ceremony for the Fujianese Youth Community Exploration Project. This project aimed towards creating bonds between a group of new Fujianese immigrants who have been in the US for less than two years, and a group of American-born Fujinese, through the medium of film. These two groups had to gather together to create two films about Fujianese community entitled, "Fujianese in East Broadway" and "Closer to Fujianese". Michelle Xu, one of the crew members involved in the "Fujianese in East Broadway" film stated that "I am now much more aware of the Fujianese population in Chinatown and appreciate the diversity in this area".


Particpants of the Film Screening and Awards Ceremony for "Fujianese in East Broadway" and "Closer to Fujianese".

Contact Project COPE at 212-941-0030 ext. 291 or 229 

CPC Central Office is seeking 2-3 interns for the fall and spring semesters, specifically in the areas of administration, events planning, and technical assistance. Please email Melinda at mfaust@cpc-nyc.org or (212) 941-0920 x150 for job descriptions and details.