Hello everybody, we're gonna go ahead and get started with our next session if you wanna make your way
to your seat. If you can hear me, can you snap? Keep snapping. I feel like it brings good vibes. Alrighty,
so as you're headed back to your seat, I have the pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker today.
Out of curiosity, how are you guys feeling about the summit so far? Shout it out. Woo! I'm excited.
I was just telling our panelists who were just up here that I feel greatly encouraged by their remarks
and insights and experiences, but also equally convicted to not allow what we heard there in that panel
to stay here in this room with us, but to carry that with us past the summit.
into our work, into our homes, into our everyday lives. And so can we just give it a round of applause
one more time for our panelists. So for our keynote speaker today, it will be Vu Li. Vu Li is an internationally
internationally known keynote speaker, writer, and nonprofit leader. For those who've had an opportunity
to see Morgan Stern's books, they are selling his new books, so check it out. Vu is known for his sharp
insights, humor, unapologetically honest perspective. Vu speaks on topics including collective impact,
equity, inclusion, burnout prevention, and the myths that often hold us back. I actually had an opportunity
to hear Vu speak at a conference a few years ago. And again, I was equally encouraged as I was also
convicted about next steps. And his remarks really shaped my perspective. And honestly, it was a breath
of fresh air in a season where I felt incredibly heavy about the work ahead. And so I think you're really
going to enjoy his remarks.
He's a great man. Mary and I have had a great opportunity getting to know him in preparation of his
summit keynote. A little bit more though about Vu is that he is a former executive director of RVC in
Seattle. Vu has spent his career advancing social justice by developing leaders of color, strengthening
organizations led by communities of color, and fostering collaboration across diverse communities. He
challenges us to take our work seriously
while also not taking ourselves too seriously. Any snaps for that? I'm thankful for the people in my
life who do that for me. And lastly, Vu brings a blend of candid insight and humor to every keynote,
drawing on real world experiences. And so I hope right now you have a notebook ready, a computer ready
to take notes of the great remarks that he's gonna bring to us. Can you help me introduce and welcome
Vu Lee to the stage, please?
Thank you so much Tatiana. Hi everyone. Thank you heading home for inviting me here to speak. I got
in here from Seattle this morning at like 1 a.m. and then I woke up at like 7 a.m. and I've been lurking
here in the shadows like a hawk, like a sexy Asian hawk, just listening to y'all and reading your post-its
and stuff. And I'm finally waking up now.
which is great because y'all are full of tacos and you're probably sleepy. So we're going to do something
to start off with, which I know some of you just love. It's called an icebreaker. I know. I know.
I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, sir. It's OK. It will only be slightly painful, but it will be short,
OK? And it's probably something you've probably never done before. I used to run an after-school program
for low-income kids, and so we had to get them active all the time. So what we're going to do today is
a rock, paper, scissors tournament. Here's how it's going to work. You've got to listen. You're going
to start off as an egg. Everyone put your hands on your head. You're an egg. And then if you win battling
another egg, you become a chicken. You're a chicken. If you win that battle, you become an eagle.
Do that. Do that. You're an eagle. Great. Egg.
chicken, eagle, then you're going to be Superman. My kids made this up, so I don't know what's in my
program. And then if you win that round, you can become an angel, a non-denominational angel. So this
is what you're going to do. Now, you've got to find the people on your same level to battle. And it's
going to be one, two, three, shoot. One, two, three, shoot. If you win,
You go up one level. If you lose, you go down one level. You've got to find the same people in your
level to battle. The first five people to reach angel status gets a prize. And it's going to be one
of these cool rocks that I stole from my children. I told them if you keep leaving your rocks around
the house where I can step on them, I will take them to Bloomington, Indiana and give them away to random
strangers. So there you go. All right, everyone get up.
All right, you are all an egg now. Go find another egg. One, two, three, shoot. Go ahead.
We have an eagle over here. Go find an eagle. Here's another eagle. We have an egg over here.
All right. We're looking for one more angel. We got another one. We got another one. Yay. All right.
Wait. Thank you so much, everyone. All right. Go ahead and pick out a cool rock that my kid.
Here's this one, too. Yeah. Oh, you got that one.
All right, here you go. You love rocks, they're the best. All right, everyone, you can please sit down
now that you've woken up. Oh, oh, I'm sorry, we got all of our angels and all the rocks have been given away.
All right, everyone, please sit down. If you are still standing up, you have lost the tournament, so
please sit down. Just accept your fate. Sit down. All right, that got intense. There's some people over
there going to some fist fights, and there was some hair pulling. I apologize for pulling someone's hair.
All right, thank you so much, everyone. I am Vu. I use he and pronouns. And I am just so glad to be
here among you all. Yeah, it's been rough. And I miss being in front of people. And even though it took
19 years to get here, it's just so lovely here. Everything is blooming. Everyone's been so friendly.
The food has been really good. So I'm just very appreciative. Today, we're going to talk about just
How awesome we are as a sector, right? Because I don't think people understand how amazing you all are.
And then two, we're going to talk about all the challenges that we're dealing with and how do we overcome
them. And then we're going to end with how awesome we are. That's the entire thing, right? A few disclaimers.
One is that I have children, small children. And some of you may know this. If you have a baby, it's
like getting a multi-year federal grant. At first, you're like, yay.
And you're like, oh my god, this is so much work. And the requirements change every year. So I've been
very loopy. Hopefully we'll have a little bit of time where we can just answer any questions you may
have. This claim number two is that I don't claim to be an expert. I write a blog called Nonprofit AF,
which stands for Nonprofit and Fearless. That doesn't mean that I know what I'm doing, really. So this
is just one person's opinion.
Also, it's easy to say, oh, Vu, he's up on stage. He must represent all people of color, all attractive
vegans everywhere, or whatever. This is just one person's perspective. So you can just disagree with
anything that I'm saying. I might cuss a little bit. OK, is that OK? Do people cuss in Bloomington?
Some people get very offended. So just in case, apologies in advance. First, let's talk about how awesome
we are as the sector.
I liken this sector, the work that you're all doing, to air, whereas other sectors are like food, right?
And the work that you're all doing is like air, and no one appreciates air until they need it, right?
Until they have maybe one medical crisis, and then they're out, you know, and they lose their home or
something. But until that happens, they may never appreciate the work that you're doing all the time.
So society does not really appreciate the work that
you all do every single day, right? That's why we barely have any shows about non-profit work, or like
the work that we all do, you know? I was watching like, there's like 19 shows about cake, about baking.
I was watching a show called, Is It Cake? Yeah, do you like Is It Cake? Such a good show. People bake
these cakes, and they're realistic looking, and some people have to guess, is this a cake, or is it
like a shoe? That's the entire premise of this show.
Right? But the work we do is just as suspenseful. You know, like, are we going to file that 990 tax
form on time? You know? Are we going to, can we fill out these tables at our gala? Do we need to pack
it with volunteers to make it look full? Stuff like that. I was thinking of cool shows we could pitch
to Netflix, for example. The Amazing Free Supplies Race. This is when, like, a bank moves or something,
and they're like, hey, you nonprofits, we're moving.
And we have all these free supplies and furniture and all these nonprofits assembled into this team
to be the first to get that sweet metal filing cabinet. There's also dancing with major donors. Well,
we partner up a nonprofit leader with a major donor, and the nonprofit leader is like, should I call
this person? It's been three weeks since we've emailed them. We don't want to seem too aggressive, but
we need this gift renewed.
Or my favorite, Nonprofit and Afraid. Anyone has seen Naked and Afraid? Naked and Afraid, no one here.
Amber has seen Naked and Afraid. Naked and Afraid is on the Discovery Channel, y'all, so you know it
is educational. It takes these two people and they are strangers and places them in the wilderness.
And they have to survive for three weeks and they get a survival item that's usually a machete
and a fire starter, and they are naked and afraid, and they get bitten by mosquitoes a lot. I'm thinking
we take someone who's never worked in housing and homelessness before, and we place them at a shelter
or something, and they get a survival item that's like a 1993 Honda Accord to survive. Anyways, the
point is we've been invisible for a really long time, and we really need to stop, right?
Things have been really dire the past several years, and it's gotten really, really bad. I've
aged significantly. I'm only 24. This has been really rough. I'm just thinking that we're in this moment
where we have this existential crisis now, where we just cannot put up with the same stuff that we've
been dealing with before the pandemic, before everything that's been going on,
Now we have an opportunity to do something completely different. We were looking at that vase with the
faces and stuff. Now we can see something completely different. And let's do that. So I just want to
just run through some of the things that we need to start thinking about doing differently.
First of all, we've got to stop putting up with bullshit, y'all. There is so much bullshit in our sector.
I was talking to a donor who was like, well, we want to give you money, but we don't want this money
to be spent on your
garbage expenses like staff salaries because that's overhead and we don't like overhead. So annoying.
We put up with this from donors and funders and politicians and it's just been very irritating. I kind
of liken the work that you all do to firefighters putting out the fires of injustice, right? Can you
imagine a firefighter rushing to put out the fires
And then someone stops them and says, I want to make sure that the money I'm giving you to put out these
fires is being spent on the water and not the hose. Because the hose is overhead. And I don't, we don't,
what is your hose to water ratio? And because we're nice people, we're like, oh, no, no, don't worry.
We found another funder who's paying for the hose. You're only paying for the water.
We're spending less than 15% of our money on the hose this year. That is so much bullshit. And because
we're nice people, we just answer that without thinking how ridiculous this is. How do we address the
fires? And we're stopping all the time to answer questions like this. The answer when someone asks,
what's your hose to water issue should be, get the hell out of my way. There are fires. OK, we don't
have time for that anymore.
We also don't have time for questions like the sustainability myth. When funders or donors are like,
how are you going to sustain this program when this grant that we give you runs out? How are you going
to sustain it? I don't know, Kevin. Why don't you sustain it? You're a funder. You have money. I have
shit to do. You sustain it. I mean, it's so annoying.
How are we going to leverage this grant that we give you to get additional grant funding? You leverage.
You know everyone. Give us money, and then go tell your friends, give us money, too, so that we can
run our programs. We're very busy. I don't understand. Right? That's so silly. We need to stop putting
up with this. On my blog, Nonprofit AF, you can find a blog post called Standardized Answers to the
Sustainability Question.
where there's nine different versions and you just copy and paste them into grant proposals. And this
executive director called me up and said, Vu, I copied and pasted your medium length version into a
grant and got $25,000. So because it's a silly, silly answer, in many ways what you're doing is filling
out the gaps left behind by the rest of society. If the market forces were doing its job,
If government were representative of its people, and people were paying their fair share of taxes, and
corporations were treating their workers, well, maybe people wouldn't be so homeless, right? So the
fact that these systems have been broken, and then you're out there trying to fix it, and people are
like, how are you going to pay for all the tools you're using to fix all this stuff that we've been
causing? It's insulting.
So we gotta stop dealing with all this and putting up with it. We've also been dealing with BS from
our corporate friends. My friend calls it besplaining. Besplaining is like mansplaining when a for-profit
does it to a non-profit. By the way, thank you to any corporate sponsors for bringing me here today.
Really appreciate you all. But I fly around and I talk to corporate people and they're like, Vu, do
you all do
Over there, non-profit, what we do over here, it's called accounting. Do you know what numbers are?
Of course we do. When you are forced to play funding Sudoku on a daily basis, because no one funds 100%
of anything, and people want to fund certain specific parts, and you got to start to piecemeal Frankenstein
bits of stuff together, then you become the best accountants ever, right? So it's insulting.
And there's some major differences between for-profits and non-profits that we don't acknowledge.
For example, in for-profit, if a company does really well, if Apple sells a million iPhones this quarter,
and next quarter it sells two million iPhones, it doubles its revenues. In this sector, the work that
you're doing, if you're serving 100 families and now suddenly 200 families need your services,
Now you're scrambling for resources because the reimbursement rates are not going to be 100%. You're
subsidizing every single person, every single service that you're doing. So it's not sustainable. The
more successful you are at your work, the less sustainable you become oftentimes. And also, you're expected
to perform miracles on these highly restricted, limited orders. Like we gave you $10,000 last year.
Why didn't you end homelessness?
Like, this is what you're expected to do all the time. You know? People are like, oh, you house 20 people?
That's great. That's like an output, not an outcome. Can you imagine if four products had to do with
this? Can you imagine going to Apple and saying, hey, Apple, you sold a million iPhones last quarter?
But that's an output, right?
I want to know the outcomes, Apple. Of the million iPhones you sold, how many people used their iPhones
to update their resumes, and then used their job, and then used their iPhones to get jobs? How many
people did you have to find jobs for? Well, how many seniors fell and broke their ankle, and then they
used their iPhones to go onto WebMD and learn how to foster attorney care for their broken ankle, and
so they did not go to the emergency room, and so they saved taxpayers' money? How much in taxpayers'
money did you have to save, Apple?
That's what you're expected to do all the time, right? And it's very, it's really irritating. So we
need to stop putting up all this bullshit. Yeah, we can absolutely learn from our corporate friends
for sure. At the same time, there are certain challenges that are very unique and we need to do things
a bit differently. One is we've got to restore our sense of imagination. I think in many ways we've
lost that because we've been forced into this learned helplessness sphere.
because of limited funding all the time. And we've lost the ability to imagine a better world.
In my book, there was a colleague who was talking about how there was a homelessness organization that
was celebrating their 50th year anniversary. And at the gala, their board chair went up on stage and
said, and raised a toast to 50 more years. And everyone clapped.
Right? Now, that's not something to toast to. We don't want a world where many of these organizations
are still in business. We want a world where people are at our house and safe. And maybe many of us
can go out of business and we can quit our jobs and become like a wedding singer or whatever we've always
dreamed about doing. Right?
That's what we should be thinking about doing. But I think we've lost our sense of imagination, and
we need to get it back. I think we've also lost our sense of ambition. We don't know what it looks like
anymore. What does that look like? Who has heard of Juicero? Juicero? OK. You'll love this. Juicero
was a Wi-Fi connected juicing machine that came out of Silicon Valley several years ago. It was $700.
You buy these proprietary, you subscribe to these proprietary packets of cut of fruit and vegetables
for $7 each. And you place one packet into this machine and it squeezes out one glass of juice. It was
supposed to disrupt the juicing industry. Bloomberg did an investigation where they took the packets
and squeezed them by hand and got the same amount of juice, but faster.
So they wrote about this and Juicero went bankrupt. But before they did, they were boasting that they
had $125 million in venture capital. They were boasting that they had 50 full-time engineers working
to design this Wi-Fi connected juicing machine. Can you imagine what any of us could do that's better
for society if we had $125 million?
But no, oftentimes we've been trained to think very small. We start to think that if we ask for $50,000
or $5 million or whatever, it's too much, when the reality is not enough. I want you all to have the
audacity of a Wi-Fi connected juicing machine. I want you to start thinking about that level, like what
does it take for us to solve homelessness, for people everywhere in all of our communities to have safe,
and affordable housing. What does that look like? How much is it gonna take? It's probably gonna take
like at least two or three more zeros. So add a zero to your budget. When you are asked, if you're a
funder, add a zero. If you're a policymaker, start thinking big too. I think that's the only way we're
gonna have to solve many of these problems here. So we need to start thinking and imagining much bigger
than we have been because we have not in many ways. I think in many ways,
We've kind of started believing that the world is always going to be crappy, and our job is to make
it just 10% less crappy. And we're not going to be able to solve problems if we start thinking incrementally
like that. There's other things we need to change, like philanthropy and our relationship with funders.
It's been really exhausting. I'm so sick of writing all these grant proposals, because funders oftentimes
think that they deserve a special snowflake grant application.
and a special snowflake grant report when it's all the same information. Except some funders want this
answered in 500 characters, another one wants it in like a thousand characters. It's all the
same information. It doesn't have to be that way. I remember a funder calling me up once and he said,
I was in my car, you know, eating my lunch between meetings. And he called me up and said, he said,
Vu, I really like what your organization is doing. Can you find a grant that you wrote for another funder
and just forward the whole thing to me?
Don't even worry about changing the name of the other foundation or anything, just forward the whole
thing to me. And I hung up the phone, and a single teardrop rolled down my face, poetically. And I looked
through my phone, and I found a grant that I had spent like 40 hours working on. It had like a 10 page
narrative and 13 attachments, including a logic model, a theory of change, a budget in Word,
the blood types of every staff member for some reason, I don't know, forward the whole thing to this
funder. It literally took like two minutes and we got $200,000 or so, right? They got everything that
they needed. There was no need for them to have their own special snowflake grant application. So why
do we keep doing this? We just put up with this. I think every non-profit should just have like one
grant proposal and just be done with that.
The other thing is like, we got to change the way that we've been doing fundraising. We've been trained
to constantly be grateful all the time. We've been trained to have this attitude of gratitude, right?
And I hate it. I don't care that it rhymes, okay? Attitude, gratitude. And it manifests in like this
thing where, you know, we have this donor-centric model fundraising, where you are supposed to elevate
donors, put them on pedestals, make them feel like heroes,
And it's exhausting. We are trained to do things like, make sure you use the word you all the time when
you write handwritten thank you notes. Like, you did this. Because of you, our community is stronger.
Because of you, several families were housed or whatever. We couldn't have done this without you. And
I am very tired of it. I kind of liken it to, I don't know, husband-centered marriages. Right?
Now, I've been a husband before, and I would love it every single time I did the dishes or something,
my partner writes me a handwritten thank you note. Like, Devo, you did it. Because you loaded up the
dishwasher today, our family is stronger. Our community is better because of you. The children and I
are so thankful for your presence in our family.
please come to this exclusive wine and cheese event for amazing husbands like you. I would love that.
And I'd be more likely to do the dishes if that were to happen. But is that an effective marriage? I
don't think it is. How do we solve these problems if one party is supposed to chase after the other
one, constantly thanking them, making them feel special all the time? It's turned our sector into this
Sky Mall catalog.
You know? We're focused on customer service. We're not focused on addressing these issues and going
out of business. We're focused on making sure that donors feel really good, that they have a good customer
service, so that they come back and keep buying our services forever. Like a Sky Mall catalog, which
I don't know why they disappeared. I really like that catalog. We shouldn't do that anymore. We need
to have some deep,
conversations with our donors. It prevents us from having conversations with our donors. Like, why do
we have these systems of inequity in the first place? Probably because some of you are not paying your
fair share of taxes. Right? So how do we have these conversations with donors if we are told to treat
them like heroes? How do we actually tell them, hey, look, we need you to pay your share of taxes
It needs to be equitable so we can start thinking about building better housing for people and raising
minimum wage. How do we have conversations with businesses and say, look, you've got to pay people better?
But instead, we don't do that. They keep hoarding. They keep exploiting workers oftentimes. And then
people need services. Then they donate some money to us to then provide some of these services. Then
we're told to thank them. And that continues this cycle. We have to get out of this cycle, y'all.
Yeah, we have to do a much better job with advocacy and lobbying and organizing. We have not done enough
of that. In college, I became a vegan. And that was really rough because this was before veganism was
cool. And all we had were salads every day. And it was really awful. It was tough. So I formed
the Vegetarians Union. And I recruited like 200 students.
And we marched on the administration to demand better foods for vegans and plant eaters everywhere.
It was really difficult because many of us fainted from lack of protein and iron. And our pleather shoes
kept breaking down. It was the most difficult 300 yards we had ever walked. But you know what? It worked.
And within a month or so, we got
tofu nuggets and stuff that we were wanting. The point was we need to start organizing and do things
a lot more. We can't just address the symptoms of inequities anymore. We've got to start working to
change the systems that we have. So that's that. And then a few other things. We've got to get out of
this scarcity and martyrdom complex, y'all. S&M, scarcity and martyrdom.
It has not been good. All right, some of y'all are sitting on crappy chairs that you got on Craigslist
12 years ago. Probably, right? Who has a chair that you duct taped together from somewhere? You know,
we gotta start paying our team members better. We gotta start thinking about how do we create the space
where people are not burning out because that's been happening. And it's getting worse because now demands
are getting higher and people are burning out at greater rates
And it's often because this scarcity mindset that we've been forced into. And I wanted to get out of
that. You deserve a nice chair to sit on while you change the world. You deserve vacation time and a
sabbatical policy for every single person here. If you work like five or seven years, you deserve a
couple of months at least of time off to recharge here. So everyone should have that in your policy here.
People are starting to move into four-day work weeks and things now. So we've got to start thinking,
how do we do things differently and not just doing the same things? Many of our best practices are really
terrible. I don't know. A lot of our boards are so ineffective. We're still using Robert's rules. Who's
Robert? Why are we still using his rules? With the motions and the tabling,
Robert was Henry Martin Robert, who in 1876 took the U.S. Congress parliamentary procedure and put them
into a book, and now 150 years later, literally, we are still using the set of rules that was designed
for 400 people, not 12 people eating hummus and some tiny oranges. Thank you, sir. Yeah, thank you,
Jeff. We can start using Jeff's rules now.
It's like Taco Tuesday. Many of the things in our sector, like Robert's was like Taco Tuesday. You don't
have to eat tacos on Tuesdays. Is it Tuesday? And we had tacos. We don't have to. Next year, if it's
on a Tuesday, I don't want to see tacos here, OK? Many of the things, they're just suggestions made
up by people. We don't have to use them. And people are starting to do things differently. Like, do
we need to have one CEO? No.
People are starting to move to flatter structures with their shared leadership, because so many CEOs
and EDs are burning out. So now people are starting to do shared leadership, co-directorship. Even some
organizations, they don't have any leadership at all. They're just very flat, and they have a lot of
meetings. But it works sometimes. We can start doing things like that. So we've got to be bolder, and
we've got to protect DEI. We've got to continue doing it.
Thank you. And we're going to move towards DEI Equity 2.0. I know we've been under attack. DEI has been
under attack. But it's only been under attack because it's been working. Why would they attack something
that doesn't work? It's been working to restore equity and justice. That's why it's been under attack.
And we need to start really focusing on doing a better job with DEI. Even the 101 stuff, we still need
to do a better job with.
Some of y'all, for example, still don't list salaries in your job postings. If I see that, I'm taking
you down. Put your salary postings on your salaries and your job postings, OK? Also, like, I don't know,
there's still a lot of job postings that's like, must have a BA or a master's preferred. Why? I've been
an executive director
of two organizations over 13 years. And I can tell you, you don't need a formal degree to be an ED.
You just need a high threshold for pain and chaos. So no, stop leaving people behind. There's tons of
people. We know the education system is inequitable. So stop using it to discriminate against people.
There are some brilliant people who, for whatever reasons, they may not have a formal degree. But they
may have lived experience that we definitely need.
in this work. But we need to value that more than like a BA or whatever. I saw a job posting that said,
must be able to lift 50 pounds. Like, why? I mean, I'm a vegan. I can barely lift up my arms. So we've
got to start being a lot more thoughtful about how we go about doing this. But I also think DEI 2.0
is really exciting.
Like with the fundraising we've been doing, for example, talking to donors about like where their family's
wealth came from and thinking about how we can do maybe reparation. I was talking to this major donor
who attended a workshop where she discovered that her family's wealth came from stolen indigenous land,
like literally pushing a native family off the land and taking it. And she decided that when she gets
her inheritance, she's gonna get 100% of it back to the native community. Like that is DI 2.0.
And it's amazing, and it's hopeful. I'm going to wrap up, because I would love to hear your thoughts
on things and any heckling you might be wanting to do. I know it's easy for me to come up here and just
yell at you all a lot and talk about all the things wrong with our sector. But the reality is that our
sector is amazing. I love our sector. And I know the last few years have been really, really depressing.
And but at the same time, there's some really hopeful things that are happening out there. And I don't
want us to lose hope. There's some brilliant things every single day all over the world that are happening.
Like Mexico, I think, just forgave like 5 million predatory mortgage loans instantly for like 5 million
people. Finland just eliminated homelessness. They made housing a human right and provided housing first.
The hole in the ozone layer is closing, y'all. In like 10 years, we won't have a hole in the ozone layer.
The giant-ass patch of garbage in the Pacific Ocean, it's shrinking. People are actually making progress
and shrinking this giant patch of garbage that's the size of Texas. And it's working. Namibia is now
all women run. Their president, vice president, speaker, assembly, all women.
And 60% of their legislators are women. Burkina Faso planted this giant wall of trees to push back the
desert, and it's working. The desert is shrinking because of it. And all over the United States, everyone
has been out there fighting against all sorts of stuff, against inequity. I think in Texas, the governor
banned rainbow crosswalks or something.
And all these artists painted rainbows everywhere, all over every city. One group took some laser lights
and projected a giant laser rainbow across the sky. So it's been backfiring. We've been seeing in Minnesota
how the communities work together to protect one another and to push back ice. And it's been really
inspiring. So I don't want you all to lose hope, because I think it has been challenging in the last
few years. But I really do believe in us.
Um, last thing I'll say is, um, I think it's, I think it's, it's, you know, doing this work can be really
challenging because sometimes you don't hear, you know, just people, just, just how much your work has
affected the lives of people. I think today we heard from our panelists, which was very inspiring.
And I, I appreciated that so much, but oftentimes we don't hear because we're, we're like air. We're
invisible. We don't hear the impact of our work.
And we don't hear thank you enough. So I just want to end by saying, by letting you know that your work
makes a huge difference. And all these ripples that you create that you may never see, I'm one of these
ripples. My family came over to the United States when I was eight years old. My father fought against
North Vietnam and was put into reeducation camp. And then we left Vietnam and came over here and didn't
have housing or food.
And it was all these nonprofits that helped us find Section 8 housing, all these political leaders and
corporate sponsors and funders. And they helped us to find housing and food. And I think the most important
thing that they did was they restored this sense of hope and community that we never thought we would
ever feel again in our new home. And I can't go back to those people who helped my family and tell them,
because of your work, I was inspired to go and get my master's in social work so I can pay it forward.
Dropping out of pre-med, making my parents very proud. You know, I can't tell them that. But that's
what your work does. You probably help just so many people that you will never hear from because they
may not have the emotional capacity or maybe the language skills
at that moment to let you know how much of a difference it made to them. I got my master's in social
work, and then I went and I worked at a non-profit helping low-income youth. And I remember just a couple
years ago, I was flying somewhere, and I heard someone call my name. It was like, Mr. Vu. And I turned
around, and there was this young man who said, Mr. Vu, do you remember me?
I used to be in your after school program, like 10 years ago. And I remember this kid because he was
so frustrated at this homework that he was not able to do. It was a math homework. But his English skills
were not good enough to understand the story problem. So I sat down and tried to help him as best as
I could. But I have a master's in social work. I don't know math. So I got another staff to come and
help him. And this kid will come to this.
program every single day. And then I became an executive director. And then I spent a lot of time just
raising money, yelling at staff, weeping in the supply closet slash conference room. And I never saw
this kid again for 10 years, until that day. And he said, Mr. Vu, because of what you did, what you
and your program did, I was able to graduate from high school.
And then I went to college and I graduated. And now I got this really cool job at this airline. And
he was just beaming. And I just thought about all the kids that we helped that we just lost track of
and we just never saw from again. Right? And I think about all the ripples that you create every single
day that you may never, ever see ever. But it makes a huge amount of difference. Because that day, I
got a free upgrade to first class.
Thank you. So that is it. I would love to hear from you all. Actually, do we have any time, Mary,
for this? One minute. Take five minutes. All right. Any questions or comments or anything here? Oh,
we can just end and eat more tacos. Wait, they cleared the tacos.
Oh, well, thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Jeff. You are my new favorite person in this room. Oh, yes,
Amber too. Yes, you're my second favorite person. Thank you so much, everyone. I know, again, things
have been really rough, but I want you to keep notice. But I think in some ways, we're seeing all these
challenges because, in many ways, it's because
The new order, the status quo is dying off. And people are starting to reckon with the fact that many
of these systems are not working for us. And so I think that we're kind of like last year was the year
of the snake. And this year is the year of the horse. But last year, the year of the snake was like,
the snake, no one likes the snake. They're like evil, and they get people to eat fruit or whatever.
And they're like gross.
But I think the snake is also a symbol of shedding of old skins so you can have a better snake. And
that's kind of where we are right now as a society. We're shedding the skin of inequity and injustice
and all the things that no longer function and work for many people in our communities anymore. So we're
going to have a better, more equitable snake when this is all done. So you are like the doulas for the
snakes of equity.
Thank you.