Kenneth S. Chuang,
UCLA David Geffen
School of Medicine
and The Venice Family Clinic

Dr. Kenneth Chuang receives the Rosenfield Distinguished Community Partnership Prize in recognition of his work with refugees and victims of torture at the Venice Family Clinic. In 2002 he began volunteering as a psychiatrist at the Venice Family Clinic in order to start a new service for refugee families who had been either tortured or trafficked into the U.S. In cooperation with Dr. Jose Quiroga at the Venice Family Clinic and the Program for Torture Victims, he established the Refugee Trauma Clinic, a comprehensive medical service for torture survivors. He has also recruited UCLA faculty physicians to help provide care and created a new elective rotation to train medical students and residents in the care of torture survivors and their families.

Dr. Chuang has recently expanded his work at the Venice Family Clinic to assist the clients of another non-profit, the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST). CAST serves trafficking victims who are typically young women and children from Southeast Asia or Latin America, and who were brought into the US for domestic servitude or forced prostitution. The new CAST Clinic is a separate service for young trafficking survivors that offers comprehensive medical care, training to students, and client advocacy.

Robert Nakamura,
UCLA Department of Film, Television & Digital Media
and Visual Communications

Through Professor Robert A. Nakamura, Visual Communications — a community-based media center serving the greater Southern California area — has been connected to UCLA since its inception 35 years ago.
In 1970, as a UCLA graduate student in the Department of Film/Television, Professor Nakamura formed Visual Communications to combat the existing racial stereotyping that dominated film and television. Nakamura recruited other UCLA film students and VC became the first Asian Pacific American media group in the country. Professor Nakamura served as its Founding Director, and his and other UCLA student films bankrolled VC for its critical inaugural years.

Through Nakamura’s 25-year tenure as a professor at UCLA he has served on VC’s Board of Directors and has mentored generations of UCLA students to staff, volunteer and support VC. Together they have helped Visual Communications serve the Asian Pacific American communities in Southern California through its diverse programs of community media training, filmmaker support and Asian Pacific American visual archives.

Chon Noriega,
UCLA Chicano Studies
Research Center
and Self-Help Graphics

Chon Noriega is recognized for his significant and ongoing contributions to Chicano and Latino scholarship in a variety of artistic media, and for his leadership and implementation of a partnership with Self-Help Graphics and Art (SHG). As Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Professor Noriega established a community partnership with SHG through the “UCLA in LA” initiative; now in its second year, the CSRC-SHG partnership provides a model for university-community collaboration.

Professor Noriega’s leadership, however, goes far beyond one partnership: he has undertaken a broad array of initiatives to establish and nurture an informed, substantive, and ongoing partnership between the university and community-based groups in the arts. Most recently, his record of supporting the research, collection and preservation of Chicano/Latino arts, has culminated in his appointment as adjunct curator of Chicano and Latino Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the launching of a new partnership between LACMA and UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center.

Paul Ong,
UCLA Ralph & Goldy Lewis Center
for Regional Policy Development
and Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics, Inc.

The goal of the decade-long collaboration between LEAP (Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics, Inc.) and Professor Ong is to increase public awareness of the socioeconomic needs of low-income Asian Pacific Americans (APAs) in Los Angeles, thus improving the policy and funding climate for APA community economic development organizations. Asian Pacific Americans were seen simplistically as being economically successful, a stereotype belying the reality of poor communities such as Little Phnom Penh, Chinatown and Koreatown.

Since the early 1990s, the LEAP-Ong partnership has produced a highly influential and widely cited book (“Beyond Asian American Poverty,” 1993 and 1999) and several chapters for LEAP’s series on “The State of Asian Pacific America.” These publications have received both local and national coverage, and have been used by hundreds of organizations. The projects provided research training to graduate students who have emerged as community leaders (Dennis Arguelles, former Director, Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council; Chanchanit Martorell, Director, Thai Community Development Center; Erich Nakano, Deputy Director, Little Tokyo Service Center). The joint effort also provided a foundation for community economic development training within LEAP and other organizations. This collaboration has helped transform Asian Pacific American community economic development in southern California and around the nation.