It has been 20 years since APHCV was incorporated in 1987. I am excited to celebrate with you the journey that APHCV has taken all these years! We have seen policy and advocacy work for and by our communities through APHCV. There have been many collaborations and new projects created and sustained. Many thousands of people have been provided services through APHCV’s collaborative organizations and APHCV itself. It has been a great pleasure to see valuable friendships and relationships created through APHCV, myself included as a recipient of such great friendships. I celebrate this blessing every day, and so I thank you.

This year 2007 marks our 20th year of caring, service and advocacy. We will have a series of events for our supporters, patients, staff and communities. I hope you will join us for these events!

It always amazes me when I reflect on our humble start beginning in a small office in an abandoned bank building in Los Angeles' Chinatown in 1991. I was hired as the first Executive Director in 1991 and started our operations along with a handful of volunteers. I cherish these earlier years of our work mainly collaborating with other organizations to advocate and provide health services. I also applaud the courageous decision that the Board of Directors made in 1996 that APHCV provide direct primary care services. In April 1997, APHCV moved to a medical building owned by Kaiser Permanente in East Hollywood. The statistics showed that the surrounding areas had the highest concentration of ethnically diverse, low-income Asian Pacific Islanders (APIs).

I have to believe that when a group of people work together for a single important mission, in our case to provide quality of care and access to it, that mission begins to have its own life and leads us. It sounds strange, but APHCV successfully opened its doors to patients after only two months of occupancy and bought the medical building in 1999 from Kaiser Permanente. Since that time APHCV’s programs and capacity have just exploded. We are now a medical home for almost 10,000 patients, and we provide close to 40,000 medical visits and the countless number of health education, outreach and enrollment services to our patients and people in the communities.

Our programs have comprehensive and broad scope. We provide family planning, pediatric, perinatal and gynecologic, adolescent, adult and senior health services. The service also includes integrated mental health and disease management, various screening and treatment services focusing on Tuberculosis, Hepatitis B, Sexually Transmitted Infections and HIV. APHCV’s dispensary program fills more than 300 prescriptions a day, the amount that a retail pharmacy fills. A wide range of health promotion and disease prevention activities such as education and nutrition services are also provided in addition to community outreach and enrollment program for health insurance and subsidy programs. Physical and social activities such as dance, bingo, Tai-chi and Yoga classes are offered as well. APHCV believes that enabling services are key to accessing to care so such services as transportation, interpretation and case management are also provided.

At both the 20,000 sq ft main site and the school-based health center at Marshal High School, APHCV continues to ensure the bilingual and bicultural services for many low-income families. Most come from the Thai, Pilipino, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Bangladeshi, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, and Latino communities (85% of our patients are API and 15% are Latino). The majority of our patients are working poor, monolingual, and over 75% are uninsured.

Because of language, cultural and economic challenges, many of our patients come in for episodic care, often with untreated illnesses and delayed care. Due to these hardships, APHCV is often the first primary care provider. Many of them suffer unnecessarily from otherwise preventable diseases. Treatment for these patients also tends to be more expensive, especially when you factor in medication costs for two and sometimes three separate diseases. However, APHCV is making a difference by providing a medical home for them.

In addition to the impact that APHCV has made for many of our patients, I also give deep gratitude to those who have impacted APHCV in many ways. The patients have given us donations, food, and various types of support. Some are dedicated board members of APHCV. Several patients have become our staff helping other patients like them. Many volunteers and youth intern have accepted staff positions. Some have left but come back. And most of all, we have many staff and board members who have stayed and given so much to APHCV for many years. To all of you, I give my sincere thank you. You are my shining stars and the reason why I have stayed.

APHCV currently has a $10 million budget with 130 staff. We see many challenges ahead, but we find inspiration in knowing that giving is receiving and that the relief for our patients and their families is our unified goal. We also thank the many private foundations and government programs for assisting us in helping communities. Our vision for the future is bright and strong. Our direction is to expand and continue to pave the way to ensure access to quality of care. I invite you to join us and celebrate our success, embrace this moment and together create the vision for our future. Thank you for your interest and support.