Operator News
US – Sands extends its partnership with the Asian Community Development Council
By Phil - 29 April 2022
Las Vegas Sands (LVS) has announced it will donate $175,000 to the Asian Community Development Council (ACDC), extending the company’s partnership with the leading nonprofit organization serving the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities in Southern Nevada.
Sands’ contributions will go toward two important capacity-building initiatives: $100,000 will support ACDC’s efforts to establish the new Healthy Asian Pacific Islander (HAPI) Medical Center to provide critical health care services for the AAPI community, and $75,000 will continue support for ACDC’s language bank and in-language hotline, which facilitates connections to critical social services for AAPI residents in Southern Nevada.
Sands’ medical center support enables ACDC to access a critical matching grant that puts the nonprofit closer to opening the facility, which will provide quality health services for the underserved, uninsured and underinsured populations in the Las Vegas Valley, while also removing the language barriers members of the AAPI community face in obtaining medical care. The medical center builds on the resources ACDC has offered to AAPI communities in Southern Nevada since 2015, which include helping residents with voter registration and health insurance enrollment, facilitating food and rental assistance, and providing other emergency services such as COVID-19 testing and vaccinations.
“Sands’ partnership has been extremely valuable in helping ACDC advance some of our highest-priority initiatives,” said Vida Lin, founder and president of ACDC. “Sands was a major factor in bringing our language bank and hotline online last year, enabling us to leverage in-language services to get people to resources during the onslaught of the pandemic in 2021. Sands’ new funding for the language bank and our new medical center further extends the in-language services we can offer to the community, especially as we bring the medical center closer to fruition and are able to deliver high-quality medical care in a safe, supportive space that is culturally and linguistically accessible.”
The ACDC funding comes through Sands Cares, the company’s community engagement program, and builds on Sands Cares contributions to ACDC in 2021. Sands’ donation kick-started the organization’s capital campaign to establish the API Language Link, which aims to break down language barriers between non-English speakers and social service providers by recruiting and training a team of in-language specialists to assist AAPI community members with limited English proficiency in navigating the social service infrastructure. ACDC’s API Language Link is available in Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, Pohnpeian, Shanghainese, Sinhalese, Spanish, Tagalog, Taiwanese, Tamil, Thai and Vietnamese.
“ACDC provides an array of vital programs that improve the wellbeing of AAPI communities in Southern Nevada, as well as champions these groups across the entire state of Nevada,” said Ron Reese, senior vice president of global communications and corporate affairs, who spearheads corporate responsibility for the company. “Beyond supporting the crucial services ACDC provides, we are engaging with the planned HAPI Medical Center and the language bank because these initiatives closely align with our Sands Cares focus areas of building our nonprofit partners’ capacity to serve the community and working to remove systemic barriers among underrepresented groups.”
Sands Cares’ support for ACDC is one of several engagements with diverse community organizations. Through these efforts, Sands aims to propel key programmatic initiatives that reduce and remove barriers and ensure civic representation among all populations. Since 2020, Sands has contributed to local and national nonprofit organizations that serve diverse communities, including ACDC, National Urban League, 100 Black Men Las Vegas, the National Hispanic Institute and The LGTBQ Center of Southern Nevada, among others.
