I have spent my life in the nonprofit sector supporting refugee and immigrant communities in the US and abroad. In the 1980’s I was among a handful of Hmong women of my generation to receive a college education. At the age of 25, I became the executive director of the first Hmong women’s organization in St. Paul. We tackled issues never before addressed in the community such as domestic violence and women’s rights. As simple as it sounds, it was rare and pioneering at that time. I also organized a group of Hmong women to participate in the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in China in 1995, the first time that Hmong women participated in an international gathering.

By 30, I was head of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), the oldest and only national advocacy organization for Southeast Asian Americans,   located in Washington, DC. I worked with Asian American civil rights groups to address gaps in educational achievements, fought for disaggregated data, and drew attention to economic and health disparities that are persistent in large sectors of the Asian American community. In that capacity, I co-founded several organizations, including the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), the Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund (APIASF), and worked closely with the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI).

After Washington, DC,  I spent a decade in Thailand and Laos. I worked for the International Organization for Migration to resettle Hmong, Karen and Burmese refugees. Then in Laos with the International Finance Corporation where I managed national projects to improve the investment climate for the private sector.  I also founded the first Hmong women’s organization to provide women and girls educational and economic opportunities.

In 2014, with two colleagues, I started RedGreen Rivers, a social enterprise that works with women and girls in Asia to bring their handcrafted products to the global market. In addition to being an entrepreneur, I was the director of programs and partnerships for the Coalition of Asian American Leaders (CAAL) until 2021. In my first two years, I built a cross-racial coalition to pass two pieces of legislation. The first one required the collection of student data broken down by ethnicity to address educational disparities in underserved populations and the second created a $1 million nonprofit infrastructure grant for small cultural organizations.

Throughout this journey, my heart and passion were fueld by my community. It is when I am in community that I am most intentional and effective in building power.