Doctoral Candidate Catalina Tang Yan and Grassroots Parent Advocates Receive ARDRAW Grant
BUSSW doctoral candidate Catalina Tang Yan, in collaboration with parent advocates Angélica Bachour and Consuelo J. Pérez, received the Social Security Administration’s Analyzing Relationships between Disability, Rehabilitation, and Work (ARDRAW) grant, a one-year program that awards a $10,000 stipend to graduate-level students to foster new analysis of work, rehabilitation, and disability issues.
Tang Yan, whose dissertation research focuses on interrogating and contesting power and interlocking systems of oppression within Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) collaborations, will work with Angélica Bachour and Consuelo J. Pérez to conduct interviews and focus groups with immigrant caregivers whose preferred languages are not English. Their project, “Exploring Structural Barriers and Promoting Factors of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Families in the Transition Planning through CBPR,” is framed as an online multilingual family institute for immigrant caregivers of youth or young adults with Intellectual and/or Developmental Disabilities and/or co-occurring Mental Health conditions (IDD-MH) in the transition planning process. Tang Yan, Bachour, and Pérez will combine participatory inquiry with action to explore structural barriers and supports experienced by these groups. This project builds on previous CBPR collaborations that Tang Yan and Community Advisory Team (CAT) members received funding for and co-led together in 2019 (Partnering with Families to Promote Language Justice and Equity in Education Settings) and in 2020 (Healthy Mom, Healthy Family: Partnering with Immigrant Families to Promote Culturally Competent and Integrated Language Access at the Intersection of Healthcare & Education Systems to Support Mothers with Special Needs Children).
Tang Yan, Angélica Bachour, and Consuelo J. Pérez seek to create counter-spaces where immigrant caregivers’ voices are centered “because the system has never heard the voice of parents,” states Consuelo J. Pérez, an artist, parent advocate, community interpreter, and mother of a child with special needs. “We are giving [caregivers] the tools for them to feel comfortable and free to say ‘this is affecting me, so we need to do something.’ We are helping everyone do it, so the system can change by hearing from everyone.”
Angélica Bachour, an immigrant mother of two children with special needs and a parent advocate, highlights project goals and emphasizes the importance of integrating a language justice lens and parents’ humanity and leadership. “The goal of our project is to support the parents from the very beginning, as we’ve been doing during the previous two years,” says Bachour. “We’ve focused on parents as individuals, parents who have emotions and feelings … that’s something that has been missing.”