Asian Pacific Islander Women Voices held their first community event discussion in honor of Women’s History Month on March 7 in the Winn Center. The event was held by community groups such as Advocate Sacramento, the Indian Association of Sacramento and My Sister’s House of Sacramento.

The event was designed for different cultural groups in the community to come together to share ideas and provide a call to action to a safer environment for women in the community.

Counselor Paolo Soriano attended the event to support the women of the API community.

“My role was to simply collaborate with the main organizers of the event and encourage as many of our students to attend,” Soriano said.

The event started with introducing emcee of the event, Marlei Martinez. Martinez opened the event and welcomed all who attended. She gave the audience a brief background on her heritage and the reason why she is honored to emcee the event.

“What better way to spend International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month by coming together and sharing our voices,” Martinez said. “We are here to talk and share our opinion.”

The event had tables labeled with different races, including Filipinos, Indians, and Pacific Islander among others. Women sat down at the tables identified as their ethnic group.

At the tables, women discussed two focus questions provided by the event that were related to helping and improving women’s lifestyle and struggles in the community.

The first question asked what kind of services or information are needed to improve the well-being of API women in the Sacramento County and the second talked about what problems they see API women in Sacramento County facing.

The attendees of the event spent about 15 to 20 minutes discussing these questions and writing their ideas down on a poster board. After time was up, each of the groups shared their discussions and hung their posters up around the room.  

The event ended with community leaders hearing and reacting to the discussions and also shared actions that needed to be taken.

Event organizer Nilda Valmores said she was inspired to see how many women showed up to the event.

“It was inspiring to see API women empowered to share their thoughts and opinions,” Valmores said. “I would like to see more local government funding to provide these services.”