Released: March 03, 2005

New Asian-language consumer education materials go online

Consumer Action posts free Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese publications on housing discrimination and medical privacy

Consumer Action has posted a large new selection of its Asian language publications on the Internet. The free consumer rights publications, covering housing discrimination and medical privacy, are made available online with a grant from SBC. According to Kathy Li, Director of Consumer Action's National Consumer Education Center, "A barrier to increased participation in the technology revolution has been the limited number of Internet based consumer education publications in languages other than English. Without such web-based materials, CBOs have little incentive to encourage their clients to use the Internet or to use it themselves. Our project is filling a gap with multilingual online publications." Consumer Action has created a national network of community agencies that distributes its materials to senior, disabled, low income, disadvantaged minority, immigrant and limited English speaking consumers. Through its network, Consumer Action's National Consumer Resource Center distributes more than two million fact sheets and other educational materials annually. Most of CA's materials are issued in Chinese, English, Korean, Spanish and Vietnamese. This announcement is part of an ongoing Consumer Action initiative to ensure that its free multilingual educational materials reach the community based organizations (CBOs) that need them to serve immigrant and limited English speaking consumers. Consumer Action is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) consumer education organization headquartered in San Francisco, with staff based in Washington, DC and Los Angeles. Founded in 1971, Consumer Action has a three-decades-long history of researching, writing, publishing, translating and distributing, for free and in bulk, original education materials on telephone, utility and financial services.