Peace and Love to all my friends, comrades, and movement family,
After I graduated from high school, I wanted to work with the Southeast Asian community more, specifically the Vietnamese community because I wanted to connect more with Viet people to learn our hxstory and struggles that Viet community is facing in Philadelphia. While trying to find a way do that, my college work-study sent me to an organization called VietLead- a nonprofit organization serving the Vietnamese and Asian communities in Philadelphia and South Jersey. I worked with Vietlead for two semesters as a college organizer and farm assistant manager for the OurRoots program. Throughout the two semesters, I learned about Food Sovereignty and Food Justice Movement works. Two thing that I took away from this work was how to farm and use farming as a way to connect our community. I learned that even though there is a gap between age, family background, or even different places that we live in, but one thing that we may have in common is knowledge with growing food.
As I finished my first year of college, I made an important decision in my life to take a gap year from school. I wanted to have more capacity to work and learn with my community. In addition to that, I wanted to learn more about the work that other Asian ethnic groups have been doing across the nation. During the summer of last year, I got to learn about a national fellowship program called Seeding Change through a cohort that had fellows base in Philadelphia. They encouraged me to apply for the program in 2019.
Fast forward to this year 2019, I applied and got accepted to Seeding Change ya’ll!!! It’s a transformative experience for me. With the fellowship, I was able to build my relationship and comradeship with other fellows across the nation. In addition to that, I was able to learn more about different ways of organizing our community and think more deeply about what organizing would look like in community college setting.
I’m here to ask that if you can donate any amount from $1, $5, $10, $20, or even beyond that to this AMAZING program that transformed my life. The money that you donated will sustain the program and go toward next year's cohort! There is a minimum of $10 donation on this page, however, you can also Venmo me @Minh-Tran-29 ! You can even give me CASH TOO! If you are unable to donate in any circumstances, Please help by sharing this donation page! Thank you so much and I love you ALL <3!!