STEP 1 - An Assessment of the Present Problem:
Creating a list of target goals is the first part of addressing any community's issues. This is done in order to create pathways for the determination of funding both public and private. It also helps the advisor to take steps in understanding the community by knowing the background of the community's social, political, and economic status. In assessing the research, certain community sources of strength and weakness will avail themselves within the advisor's analysis.
The advisor should plan on setting up an initial meeting with the most active and knowledgeable community agency. Within this initial meeting, the advisor will reiterate how well the agency is doing by noting their knowledge of the community, by acknowledging their work within the community and by going over with them their own assessment of their community's problems.
The micro goals of this meeting and follow-up meetings is to learn. The advisor requires knowledge of issues such as how long community problems have existed and what walls the agency has run up against in implementing their previous programs. The advisor will have to find out whether or not others outside of the agency have attempted any actions and what of these proposed actions proved to be a successful program or a failure and why. The advisor will need to learn of other groups within the community that may offer support or provide opposition and to what degrees this support or opposition is meted out.
There has been a rapid growth of satellite or suburban Chinese American communities, notably in the San Gabriel Valley in cities such as Monterey Park and Alhambra. Most still regard New Chinatown as the social, spiritual, and cultural base of their heritage.
The growth of the elderly population among this group has equally been dramatic. According to the 1990 census, in a span of ten years, the Asian American elderly population...