Health Equity Project

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The Health Equity Project aims to address health disparities and health literacy gaps facing the South Asian American community. Our community health improvement plan is multifaceted. We intend to establish community-academic partnerships that focus on a clinical model and determinants of a healthy lifestyle to include a more holistic, multilevel approach to addressing disparities. As different communities face different social conditions that cause different life expectancies and cause specific health problems, SAAPRI, via its health literacy and advocacy work, is exploring how our community members’ lifestyles, their living environments, and their genetics all contribute to their health. 

SAAPRI has an established track record of over 20 years of community-engaged research and advocacy on behalf of South Asian Americans in the Midwest. We are always looking to utilize our expertise to engage in new community-based participatory research being conducted to further a culture of health in our community. We view community-academic collaborations as an opportunity to conduct innovative, collaborative health equity research and engage our community members in discussions about the intersections of the diverse influences in their lives. We see a need to address the root causes of health inequity by developing a multilevel intervention to strengthen the South Asian American ecosystem, promote health, and reduce disproportionate health risks.

SAAPRI is currently promoting healthcare awareness amongst South Asians in partnership with the NIH’s All of Us Research Program via their Asian Recruitment and Engagement Core to help collect health data on South Asians and improve precision medicine. To learn more about this collaboration, visit the next page.

SAAPRI is also conducting a survey in partnership with the Chinese American Service League (CASL) that aims to identify prominent social determinants of health (SDoH) impacting different AAPI communities. Our work focuses on South Asian Americans and the findings will help inform SAAPRI’s priorities for our future policy and advocacy efforts.

We are open to discussing a wide range of topics, including but not limited to discrimination in the healthcare system, the impact of COVID-19 on our communities, and how we can improve access to healthcare information and services to improve health equity via building bridges between disaggregated South Asian health data-driven research and the South Asian American community that is in need.

It is very gratifying to be able to work on community health education and research through SAAPRI’s Health Equity Project to address the various barriers to health care access facing the South Asian American community. Our team is also making sure our community has the opportunities to learn from healthcare professionals while voicing its health care experiences and concerns.

Emmanuel Ravichandar, Health Equity Project Intern