College of San Mateo is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISI) Program. The AANAPISI award encompasses a cooperative arrangement between College of San Mateo, Cañada College, Skyline College, and San Francisco State University, with funds totaling $2,500,000. CSM received $575,000 to serve AANAPI students over the next five years.

The four partnering institutions will each use their allocation from the grant to expand their institutional capacity and address an equity gap in college access, persistence, transfer, and completion for underserved AANAPI students. While the AANAPI community includes more than 45 ethnic groups from 20 countries in East and Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, the experiences of AANAPI groups are often presented under a broad umbrella. Disaggregated data on the different groups are not uniformly gathered and thus current reporting fails to reflect the range of educational experiences, challenges, and outcomes of AANAPI students.

Coordinated efforts among the four institutions will create an accessible and welcoming environment for diverse AANAPI communities, strengthen transfer enrollment pathways, and integrate career-focused learning into the student experience. Evidence-based support services that contextualize the AANAPI students in social-emotional wellness will include peer mentoring, workshops, learning communities, faculty and staff professional development, transfer-related events, and visits to SFSU.

The SMCCD colleges serve as an essential gateway to higher education for the region’s underserved AANAPI communities; and while the primary beneficiaries of the grant will be AANAPI students, other students will benefit as well, including low-income students, first-generation college students and English language learners.

The AANAPISI grant at College of San Mateo will be overseen by the Vice President of Student Services, Dr. Joshua Moon-Johnson, and the coordinator will be Dr. Christine Su. Dr. Su received a PhD in American Studies with a focus on US and Asia Relations and she previously served as the Program Director of the Center for Lao Studies and the Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Ohio University. Dr. Su has been working at CSM in student services for five years in various roles.

The grant is the first award College of San Mateo has received since it was designated an AANAPISI in 2022.