Advocacy and progressive policy & data work is a key part of my continuing career journey. In this work, I focus primarily on AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) mobilization, outreach and education.

The 2020 Project – Ambassador Manager

The 2020 Project is the voter engagement branch of UNAVSA (Union of North American Vietnamese Student Associations) and is focused on getting 100,000 Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders registered to vote by November 2020.

As Ambassador Manager on the 2020 Project team, I work with multiple field ambassadors to help them host voter engagement and registration events in their respective communities. This includes: conducting monthly training meetings, compiling policy resources and fact sheets for multiple states, retrieving AAPI-specific surveys and updated demographic numbers, and writing guides on how to host a number of civic engagement events (voter registration tabling, hosting teach-ins or workshops, etc.).

Southeast Asia Resource Action Center – National Policy Intern

SEARAC is a national civil rights organization that works with Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese American communities to create a socially just and equitable society. Their primary policy platforms are currently on education, immigration and healthcare.

As a national policy intern in Fall 2019, some highlights of the work I did were:

• Conducted refugee and resettlement story interviews with nine 1.5 generation individuals from across the country and for each, wrote up 2-3 page summaries of interviews
• Drafted press releases and digital media toolkits
• Tracked statewide bill legislation on data disaggregation for education
• Analyzed and reported on elder-specific healthcare needs/trends
• Wrote a data extraction script to analyze data on orders of deportation from TRAC Syracuse by crime, immigration, nationality, and state. 
  • From data, aggregated to reveal state, ethnicity & national assessment + graphs 

Alternative Spring Break @ Stanford

Capital or Community: Housing Inequality in the Bay Area

From January – March 2018, I co-taught an Alternative Break class at Stanford University on the Bay Area housing crisis and led a spring break trip to visit community organizations.

In this work, I developed and taught a curriculum introducing students to housing policies with global case studies, an overview of development in the US, and the housing crisis in the Bay Area. At the conclusion of the class, I then conducted a weeklong service learning trip with numerous housing rights community organizations in the Bay Area.