About

Our mission is to create a platform that uplifts and amplifies the voices of Filipino nurses, highlighting their resilience, compassion, and cultural heritage, while fostering a global community of support and appreciation.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the course of everyday life and created fear, death, and uncertainty on public health, local communities, and triggered accompanying challenges that faced frontline workers every day. The media highlighted and the world watched frontline workers fight this plaguing uncertainty and deemed frontline workers as the heroes of America. Local communities honored frontline healthcare workers in ways they had been previously unacknowledged. Nonetheless, there is one group among front-line workers that are deeply overlooked: Among all the COVID nurse deaths in the early days of the pandemic, 1 out of 3 nurses who died during the pandemic were Filipino nurse deaths.

The media and the medical field rarely discussed these striking statistics. As the death toll rose for these nurses, so did the loss of their valuable stories. Here we will shed light on these lost stories and the stories of the Filipino nurses still standing. We are Healing Heritage.

Dr. Manalang’s webinar at Harvard Divinity School on Religious Literacy and Nurses' Stories in the Age of COVID and Anti-Asian Hate

Dr. Aprilfaye Manalang began this work with humble intentions to highlight the stories of Filipino nurses in her hometown region of Virginia Beach/Hampton Roads, among the largest Filipino communities in the South. Little research has explored Asian Americans in the South, let alone their faith in God. Filipinos, predominantly Catholic and historically linked to the United States through colonialism, are the third-largest Asian-American community in the country.

As Dr. Manalang built up the project and garnered more attention, so did the scope of the project itself. Dr. Christian Gloria, Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University Medical Center, serves as the co-investigator for this project. The research team also expanded with recruitment taking place in several sites beyond Virginia. You can learn more about the Healing Heritage team members on our Team page and learn more about our research study by visiting our FAQs.

Our Institutional Partners

Healing Heritage is a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration supported by the Institute of Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University; the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative at University of California, Berkeley; the Asian American Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Religion, Race and Democracy Lab at University of Virginia; and the Louisville Institute. The team also extends special recognition to the Philippine Nurses Association of Virginia chapter of the Philippine Nurses Association of America for their help in the early stages of this research project. Researcher affiliations span across several prestigious universities listed below.