Professional Experience:
As a Vietnamese American woman who immigrated to the United States in 1971, I know the journey of battling and overcoming adversity in pursuing educational, socio-economic, and racial liberation. At the age of 7, I became our family’s “social worker” with the daunting responsibility of navigating complex social service systems designed to help. Growing up Southeast Asian in the American South added another layer of frustration not only for our family but for those from who we sought help. Sometimes we found help but often we did not. My mother’s history of intergenerational poverty, war and complex trauma coupled with my adoptive father’s untimely death as a child culminated into a personal and professional determination to help hurting people and communities access opportunity and hope. My childhood experiences left an indelible mark on my soul but also fueled a passion to ensure our nation’s most vulnerable people not only possess the same rights to safety and well-being as every other person but, more importantly, are given the same voice. Voice in how they see hope in despair. Voice in how they triumph in tragedy. And, more importantly, voice in how they thrive rather than survive.
My professional career includes serving as a national management consultant and senior philanthropic advisor to Federal and State government child welfare and social impact leaders; Chief of Staff and senior leader managing child welfare system reform and community change efforts; child protection and foster care worker; domestic violence advocate; administrator and faculty at the University of Georgia and Florida Gulf Coast University; and author of several publications addressing child maltreatment, child protection, domestic violence and community responses to child abuse and neglect. My most meaningful roles, however, were as a frontline child protection, adoption, foster care and domestic violence social worker.