For the first time ever, Long Beach has conducted a health assessment focused solely on the city’s Filipino community.
Long Beach created a Filipino Community Advisory Committee to conduct the Filipino Community Health Needs Assessment in December 2022. The committee held a town hall, multiple focus groups and conducted surveys with hundreds of individuals to gather their findings, and presented it to the Long Beach City Council Tuesday night.
According to the committee, Filipinos make up the city’s largest Asian American Pacific-Islander group in Long Beach, with over 21,000 residents residing mostly in the westside.
“The Filipino community is one that has been in Long Beach for decades, but it’s also one that has been overlooked for far too long due to our practice of aggregating all data into the Asian race category,” said Long Beach Director of Health and Human Services, Alison King.
The committee was made up of members from various local groups including the Filipino Migrant Center, the Search to Involve Pilipino Americans, St. Lucy School, the Federation of Filipino American Associations, Long Beach Filipino Festival, Kubo LB, Access to Prevention Advocacy Intervention and Treatment, and Cal State Long Beach.
Over 56 pages, the committee gathered more health information about Long Beach’s Filipino community than it has ever had access to. The report dives into issues of mental and physical health, income distribution, the effects of COVID-19, health management practices and much more.
“It’s so important to do this because it goes back to being visible, and that’s an issue that our community faces,” said Councilmember Suely Saro. “In order to do that we have to gather data and sometimes by ourselves, so I appreciate our City’s Health Department making this a priority and I think it’s long overdue that we have this assessment done.”
According to the report, nearly 60% of Filipinos in Long Beach were born in the Philippines, while roughly 40% were born in America. The physical health concerns most prevalent in Long Beach’s Filipino community are high blood pressure, pre-diabetes, diabetes and asthma.
Participants said that the highest needs in their community were more green spaces and parks, grocery stores, farmers markets and gyms.
“The Filipino community is one that has been in Long Beach for decades, but it’s also one that has been overlooked for far too long due to our practice of aggregating all data into the Asian race category.”
Long Beach Director of Health and Human Services, Alison King
The committee found that most Filipino-Americans relied on primary care and prayer to manage their health, which Kimmy Maniquis, executive director of the Search to Involve Pilipino Americans, said can be attributed to deep religious beliefs in the community.
She added that the findings on mental health may not be accurate since they were self-reported and through her work, she has found that the Filipino community may have certain stigmas surrounding mental health. Participants ages 18 to 24 were found to have the highest desire to see a professional regarding their mental health, while older age groups found less need for mental health intervention.
The report also found that younger, U.S.-born women were more likely to seek professional mental health than other groups.
“It’s really important to recognize the history of where all of our communities come from to settle in the U.S. because there are deep historical traumas that are connected to health issues and mental health issues,” Saro said. “That includes colonization and that’s a huge thing that continues to affect the generation in America even if they’ve not directly been impacted by it.”
Ongoing trauma such as physical or verbal hateful attacks may also play a role in mental and physical health, said Filipino Migrant Center Direct Services Manager Joselle De Los Reyes. She said that 32% of Filipino members of the community reported feeling unsafe using public transport, and 22% reported feeling unsafe walking in their neighborhood.
According to a report by the Associated Press, about a third of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders say they have experienced an act of abuse based on their race or ethnicity in 2023, though this report did not draw distinctions between Filipino-Americans and other AAPI groups.
Councilmember Joni Ricks-Oddie pointed out the need to draw these distinctions “because it’s the recognition that we don’t serve our communities well when we combine together different races and ethnicities when we talk about the Asian [American] Pacific Islander group,” she said.
Residents can read the full report by visiting Long Beach’s city council agenda portal and clicking on the attachments for item 19 on the agenda. The report is also available in Tagalog.
