UPICEC

My name is Margarita Satini. I am the executive director of the Utah Pacific Islander Civic Engagement Coalition (UPICEC) and I’m known for my community work in social justice; I’m a passionate community activist and advocate for my Pacific Islander People and work towards bolstering civic engagement participation within my community. In addition, I have years of experience running political campaigns, conducting community lobbying trainings, and working in underrepresented, underserved communities. I am currently focused on educating my community about COVID-19, and ensuring an accurate count of Utah’s Pacific Islander community for the 2020 census.

I’m also an organizer with an environmental organization working with communities throughout Utah to shift the dependency on coal to generating renewable energy from alternative sources, working towards a just transition in extractive communities, fighting environmental racism, educating, and creating partnerships with communities most impacted by natural disasters. 

1. What problem are you committed to solving?
We are working to slow the spread of COVID-19. In addition to our COVID-19 efforts, we would like All of Utah to declare racism as a public health crisis. 

2. What project are you proposing?
Getting Utah to declare racism as a public health crisis by creating coalitions of members in each city to pressure their Council-members to adopt our proclamation, continuing our on the ground efforts to educate our people on COVID-19 and safety directives. 

3. How could your project elevate humanity?

To address racism as a public health crisis will shift the way we eradicate it from our lives. It also meets the CDC’s four criteria to be considered a public health crisis.

This will allow the unpacking of racism via measuring public health determinants; police violence and mental health, environmental issues how it is negatively impacting communities of color, 

We are working to slow the spread of COVID-19 in our community. Currently we have the highest infection rate in our county, and 2nd highest hospitalization rate in all of Utah but we only make up about 1% of the total population. As of the 2010 census we have approximately 38K Pacific Islanders and as of yesterday this is our COVID-19 update: 

• 820 Pacific Islanders have contracted COVID-19 (2nd highest infection rate of all races/ethnicities)

  • 26 new Pacific Islander cases in the last 24 hours; 559 cases in the last 39 days

  • The Pacific Islander case rate is 2.5 times higher than the overall statewide rate

• 96 Pacific Islanders have been hospitalized for COVID-19 (Second highest hospitalization rate of all races/ethnicities)

  • 60 hospitalizations in the last 39 days

  • The Pacific islander hospitalization rate is 1.8 times higher than the overall statewide rate

• 10 Pacific Islanders have died of COVID-19 in Utah 

  • The Pacific Islander death rate is 1.5 times higher than the overall statewide rate

• 2471.0 cases per 100,000 population (Highest infection rate of all races/ethnicities)

  The Pacific Islander case rate is 3.8 times higher than the White community

We’ve built a local community COVID-19 response team focused on educating our community on what COVID-19 is, the effects on the human body, what safety directives have been encouraged by our health professionals, scheduling COVID-19 testing sites and identifying and sharing resources to help not only the initial impacts of COVID-19; health impacts, safety directives, quarantining, isolation, but secondary effects as well; job loss, housing relief, utility relief, food assistance, where to go to file unemployment, fighting for universal basic income or additional stimulus checks. Strengthening communication tactics both digital and decreased face to face outreach, and community partnerships to help educate our community. Providing daily COVID-19 updates, translating COVID-19 material, getting those materials out to the community. 

We are working directly with Utah’s Pacific Islander community. Pacific Islanders are made up of Polynesians, Melanesians, Micronesians. Our organization spends time conducting meetings, facilitating discussions, creating surveys, working with partners to gather data to identify pressing issues in our community. Because COVID-19 is greatly impacting our community we are doing the work of making sure our community has access to testing, fact sheets, masks, and other impacts.

When we were given our shelter in place directives we continued to see our numbers rise and our community still attending mass gatherings, not practicing social distancing, wearing no masks, greeting each other in our cultural ways and no one was talking about the impact, It pushed us to react with urgency. We immediately started our response with a Zoom community discussion. We invited our Pacific Islander MD’s, Utah’s clinical director for Utah health clinics who happens to be Pacific Islander to share data, we created a Covid-19 resource document, and recruited six community health workers to start doing outreach to community partners and members. We continue to push forward with education, resources, and testing. 

I am a Pacific Islander. We are losing people in our community. They are literally dying and some of these folks are close friends and family. I don’t want anymore losses. I am absolutely territorial and protective of my community and i happen to live in Utah. This has had a direct impact on me, on my family, on my relationships. We are a community made up of essential workers, homes with multigenerational families living in small spaces, are underinsured or have no insurance, have a large percentage of low income earners, and also inherit issues that come with the inequities of healthcare, environmental racism, and social injustices. 

Not only am I the Executive Director of a coalition, I am a community organizer and I know how to mobilize resources, community partners, community members around important issues. In 2019 environmental organizers, advocates and activists had created a bill HB411 - the community renewable energy act which passed out of legislation and is now law. Cities, counties, townships had to adopt HB411 in their communities in order to have a seat at the table with Rocky Mountain power and discuss transmission of electric power resources from any renewable energy resource. We started with a goal of 7 cities and by end of 2019 we had 25 commitments from cities, counties, and townships. One of the last cities, West Valley City, had members of our team believing it wouldn’t pass in their city council but continuing to apply pressure on the city council, creating a coalition of members from the community to show up for weeks of City council meetings to participate in public comments is how we went about getting a unanimous vote to pass HB411. This is the same model we used throughout the entire state. Building political community power, applyING pressure where necessary, And gathering and submitting public comments both in person and digital. 

We’re dealing with two public health crises: 

1. Coronavirus 

2. Racism 

We’ve been fighting racism for awhile and coronavirus in March. 

It has taken us years to shift how our community deals with racism, how it shows up and the impacts, how this virus has exposed the inequities we are seeing today and the disproportionate impacts the response to COVID-19 has had on communities of color.

Recently Utah tasked all nine appropriations subcommittees to find areas in their departments they can cut funding. They cut funding from Health and Human Services, Workforce services, and natural resources among other areas. Of all departments to cut funding from, they cut $2.5 million from the Health and Human Department forcing the closure of three Utah Healthcare clinics.  These clinics serve 13k people mostly from low income communities, communities of color, underinsured, those with no insurance. Our community health workers created a partnership with the university of Utah wellness bus, a mobile health screening service that started conducting COVID-19 testing and have scheduled testing opportunities throughout the week in COVID-19 hotspots for ease of access for our communities.

Before marching, protesting, and rallies were a thing, two of the members of our community were denied service at a bar. The bar tender told them, to their face, “we don’t serve Polynesians” and turned her back to the men. Our team jumped into action and planned a protest. While we were planning, i wanted to reach out to the owner to give him a chance to explain himself. We ended up planning a Diversity and inclusion, implicit bias training for his staff, helped rewrite his policy for his business, and still moved forward with the protest, and the owner settled with the 2 young Pacific Islander men. The owner and i are friends now but from that interaction, we saved his business from talks of burning it down, helped the employees keep their jobs, helped trained the employees on how to be more sensitive to the issue of discrimination, and rewrite the bar’s operating policy and saving what was a community landmark location and teaching our communities, local, state, and global (we made nations & international headlines) that working together can do wonders.