Empowering the Chinese Community with Heart Health Awareness

Meet Daily Point of Light Award honoree Ivy Kam. Read her story, and nominate an outstanding volunteer or family as a Daily Point of Light. 

Volunteering with the American Heart Association (AHA) offers Ivy Kam, a former clinical pharmacist in a cardiovascular clinic, a chance to connect with people. Her dedication to promoting heart health within the Chinese community has grown through her involvement with the AHA Chinese Community Cardiac Council. This subcommittee of bilingual volunteers undertakes a range of activities, from visiting senior centers for Chinese language health talks to creating multimedia campaigns for stroke awareness. These initiatives are vital for reaching Chinese immigrants who often miss out on education and outreach developed in English for the general public.  

For the past 18 years, Ivy has volunteered with the AHA, serving on multiple health equity councils. She is fiercely passionate about creating messaging that resonates with her specific audience. Her current role with the AHA Chinese Community Cardiac Council, which she once chaired and now actively participates in, involves a range of responsibilities.  

One recent example of Ivy’s impactful volunteering is her involvement in the San Francisco Lifeline Program. This door-to-door outreach program, conducted in partnership with a paramedics volunteer group, aims to assist monolingual Chinese seniors in setting up medical information to ensure timely access by first responders during emergencies. Ivy coordinated a group of Regeneron employees from the Asian & Pacific Islander Employee Resource Group and their family members to participate in several distribution days across San Francisco’s Chinatown. Thanks to the efforts of volunteers like Ivy, the SF Lifeline program has reached over 700 seniors in 2023-24, significantly enhancing their safety and well-being. 

Ivy’s inspiring work not only educates and empowers the Chinese community but also bridges the gap between healthcare resources and those who need them most. Read on to hear more of her story in her own words.

Tell us about your volunteer role. 

I’ve volunteered with the American Heart Association (AHA) on various health equity councils serving underrepresented patients, and as a bilingual outreach educator for the past 18 years. Being born and raised in Hong Kong and fluent in Cantonese, I’ve always seen getting involved in empowering the Chinese community on the health equity front as a natural extension of my professional calling. 

I started out in my first volunteer activity giving presentations about blood pressure and heart health at senior centers in San Francisco Chinatown in 2006, where there’s an ongoing shortage of bilingual healthcare providers and educators. In 2008, I joined the AHA’s Chinese Community Cardiac Council (CCCC), and served as the chair of this Council from 2016-19, steering efforts closing health inequity gaps in cardiovascular health in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Chinese community, including CPR training, Chinese language media campaigns (TV, print, etc.), senior center outreach and elementary school healthcare career days, translation review and more. 

One recent activity that’s very meaningful to me is the ability to engage our Asian and Pacific Islander (API) Employee Resource Group (ERG) members in the Bay Area in a door-to-door outreach program in San Francisco with the paramedics volunteer group for the Lifeline Program, where we visited monolingual Chinese seniors to help set up medical information to facilitate timely access by first responders during medical emergencies. The Lifeline program reached 700+ seniors in 2023-24! 

Why is this issue so important to you? 

This activity is particularly important to me because during the pandemic, this vulnerable population suffered heavily from the “double whammy” of the COVID pandemic itself as well as rampant anti-Asian hate and violence targeted at the senior Chinese community. Even as they become sick, there’s reluctance to seek care due to the fear of xenophobia. There’s also the common misconception that Asian patients are typically “healthy” and “wealthy” and not as hard hit by the pandemic, but data shows that the impact of the pandemic is extremely varied across different Asian subpopulations, and death rate in these vulnerable seniors who often reside in 10’x10′ single resident occupancy units was high and commonly overlooked. Serving this community while busting this “model minority” myth is core to not just my personal beliefs but part of our API ERG’s mission as well. 

What inspired you to get started with this initiative? 

My work with the AHA CCCC started out as a way to utilize my language skills to work directly with Chinese patients, something I missed since joining the biotech industry from a clinical job (I was trained as a Pharm.D. and I used to run a clinic at Kaiser.) It evolves into a deeper desire to understand how I can advocate for health equity and address injustices faced by this vulnerable community, which led to a series of events during the pandemic that contributed to me and a few other like-minded colleagues co-founding the API ERG at Regeneron to advocate for our community. 

What are your long-term plans or goals for the organization? 

The opportunity to bring this volunteering efforts to other API ERG members is very gratifying. Knowing that I have like-minded colleagues who would give their time to serve the same cause and not only help amplify the impact of our volunteering efforts, but also help improve our sense of belonging at work, means so much. My hope is that we can continue to explore opportunities to work with colleagues across the country who are interested in volunteering in the API community to cascade these efforts to other geographic areas and continue to amplify the impact of these efforts. 

What have you learned through your experiences as a volunteer? 

What I’ve learned through volunteering is that even though you may feel that you’re only one person and your impact may be small, your actions can often serve to inspire and bring others together for a much more impactful movement. For us it’s an employee resource group, but it could be something more informal as well. 

Any advice for people who want to start volunteering? 

I think one of the keys to having a productive and gratifying volunteering experience is finding other like-minded folks to do it together. Not only do you amplify the impact, I’ve personally found that it’s also fun and fills up my personal cup while doing so!  

Do you want to make a difference in your community like Ivy? Find local volunteer opportunities.