Celebrating AAPI Heritage Month and Mental Health Awareness Month

Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPI Heritage Month or AAPI HM for short) kicked off May 1, and the Pan-Asian @ Strava Employee Resource Group followed suit.

The theme of our 2024 celebration is Mindful Movement. May is also Mental Health Awareness Month. AAPIs have the lowest help-seeking rate of any racial/ethnic group, with only 23.3% of AAPI adults with a mental illness receiving treatment [src].

Many in our ERG and our community at-large can relate to the cultural whiplash of coming from heritages that historically stigmatize mental health issues and de-prioritize boundary-setting while living amid a modern rhetoric that encourages the opposite. It’s often difficult to know how to balance our cultural belief of prioritizing the community over the individual while also heeding those that tell us to advocate for ourselves and ask for help.

Given Strava’s place in the world of sport and movement, we wanted to combine these two things and discuss sport through the Pan-Asian lens, especially as a tool for mindfulness.

We’ll be celebrating that confluence of themes this month in a variety of ways, both internally and externally. We invite you to join the Mindful Movement Challenge on Strava: at least 15 minutes of activity twice a week for four weeks. Bonus points if you do it with people you love. Join the challenge here.

Internally, we’re celebrating with an ERG-only discussion about how to prevent burnout, a takeover of the traditional Strava “WoW (Workout Wednesday)” to go on a walk to get boba near our offices, and are getting our in-office lunches from AAPI-owned local businesses. We’re also hosting a Lunch & Learn for the whole company where members of our ERG will talk about the sports and movement of our heritage cultures!