We Are the City Spotlight: Filipino Community Center

By the Filipino Community Center Staff

Founded in 2004, the Filipino Community Center is dedicated to providing a safe space where Filipino families can access services, receive support, and build community. We foster and develop community empowerment, grassroots leadership, advocacy, and organizing to address the immediate and long-term needs and issues of our communities, both locally and in the Philippines.

Kabataan (KBT) is a youth program in which young people can build community based on three values: kapamilya (family), kamalayan (consciousness), and katarungan (justice). These values are carried out through weekly meetings, culturally relevant workshops and discussions, community outings, and creative projects and activities.

When the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the world, it shut down almost all socioeconomic activity and drastically changed our daily lives. With a public health emergency looming over the City and country, our already vulnerable community faced new and intensified challenges, such as losing their jobs, general economic instability, food insecurity, lack of health and safety protections while doing “essential” work, and family and home health conditions intensified by the risk of COVID-19 infection. The Shelter-In-Place order, which was meant to help “flatten the curve” of the rising number of COVID-19 cases, brought about isolation, loneliness, and disruptions in our economic, social, and spiritual lives.

In this time of uncertainty, we paused.

We reached out to our neighbors, our seniors, our youth and students, and the migrant workers in our community, some completely displaced, others at high-risk for COVID exposures on the frontlines of the economy.

We listened.

To their new concerns, the new challenges brought on by the pandemic, to their grief and their worries and fears — for themselves and their loved ones.

We adapted.

We changed our operations, identified resources to meet the new needs of our clients and community members, developed new direct service modalities, and adjusted our programs to respond to the new conditions and forthcoming challenges based on our prior experience.

We worked alongside our community partners, funders, and city agencies, and we mobilized them and our community to help each other, to support the most vulnerable, and advocate for resources for those most impacted by the pandemic.

Youth, students, and transitional-aged youth/young adults faced a whole new world. Many lost crucial in-person contact with their friends and other social support systems at school, in community programs, or at their jobs. They became very isolated. Those already vulnerable to substance abuse and mental health challenges were at extremely high risk under the intensified stress of the pandemic. Our students also had to handle new demands on crowded multigenerational households, in addition to the household and family dynamics that have always been at play. We grieved the loss of some of our dearest young and promising community leaders due to isolation, mental health, and substance abuse challenges, displacement from our neighborhood due to lack of affordable housing, homelessness, and the failure of our government institutions to provide basic health and safety for all of our communities.

During the height of the pandemic, we saw our young leaders struggle to engage virtually, but with the lifting of some quarantine restrictions and the availability of vaccines, we have been able to reinvigorate a core group of youth leaders who have expanded the KBT program throughout this first half of the school year! For Filipino American History Month in October, Kabataan hosted a youth-led informational fair at the FCC to educate our community about the experiences of indigenous youth in the Philippines and their fight for an accessible and relevant education through the Save Our Schools campaign. They set up a photobooth, a screen printing booth, and button making stations where they created clothing and buttons that uplifted slogans such as “Save Lumad Schools.” After this event, our program’s membership nearly doubled!

From this momentum, our youth have really taken the initiative to participate, lead, and mobilize for SFUSD student-led walkouts against sexual violence. On December 10, KBT youth helped organize and lead 50+ Balboa High School students to join the SFUSD student walk out and rally in front of City Hall. FCC staff supported our youth by providing supplies, providing security support, and showing up to stand in solidarity with the high schoolers.

We see participation and leadership in these youth led events and actions as the very embodiment of our three values (family, consciousness and justice) by our KBT participants.

San Francisco is a city that has been built and shaped by diverse, immigrant, working class communities. There are many things about San Francisco that have changed over the years, but we continue to defend our place in this city, fight against displacement and gentrification, demand resources for our underserved communities, and celebrate our beauty and resilience. These values are what keep FCC rooted in San Francisco, and what continues to give us the inspiration to continue our work, to nurture our youth and their families, and advocate for the concerns of working class BIPOC communities.

Our youth want more funding for the arts, for music! More resources for programs that support youth of color, immigrant youth, and queer youth. Provide more relevant education on topics that school curriculum doesn’t cover: cultural workshops, job readiness, learning about healthy relationships, emphasizing consent, etc. With the ongoing developments in SFUSD around sexual assault and sexual harassment, there needs to be more education available for our young people, resources to provide mental health support, and safe spaces for the youth to discuss these experiences.

We need a just recovery from the pandemic for working families that includes economic stability, a living wage, affordable and stable housing, healthcare, childcare, and food security.

In the Philippines, the symbolic icon of the holiday season is the parol lantern — a star-shaped lantern made from traditional materials such as bamboo, colorful paper, or capiz shells. Families use them to adorn their windows, they can be found in churches, and they are used to decorate the streets and public places. The lantern symbolizes hope and goodwill, a light to shine in the darkness. This holiday season, the message of the parol lantern is even more relevant. Where a parol shines, we can find a sense of community, a light to ignite our hope for the future.