A Woman’s Quest for Independence

Minnesota charity founded by Laotian immigrant helps Asian women adjust to life far from the rice fields

When Ly Vang was a girl in northern Laos, she resolved not to become a housewife like

those who came to her father, the chief of the province, for help with their domineering husbands.

Instead, at age 6 she decided that she would do something radical by the standard of her people, the Hmong (pronounced “mung”), an ancient tribe that lives in South China and Southeast Asia. She would help women become independent.

“I know my father is very strong and I don’t know if he likes my idea or not,” she says she remembers thinking, “but I have to find my own way.”

And find her own way she did, but not in Laos. Like many Hmong people who fled Laos after it was taken over by Communists in 1975, Ms. Vang and her husband settled in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region because it was known to offer jobs to new immigrants. In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau counted 169,428 Hmong residing in the United States, with as many as one-fifth of them in Minnesota.

In 1981, Ms. Vang started the Association for the Advancement of Hmong Women in Minnesota, one of the first Hmong women’s organizations in the United States. At the time, it was rare to find a Hmong organization of any kind in this country, but now at least 140 such charities exist, concentrated in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Hmong families come to Minnesota with much optimism, says Ms. Vang, but in many cases they are overwhelmed by the stresses of a life far removed from the rice fields of home. At the association, 22 full-time staff members offer up to 4,000 Hmong women a year the assistance they need to survive and prosper in the United States, whether help navigating grocery stores or job training. In its fiscal year ending June 30, the group raised about $900,000 — an increase of $214,000 over the previous year, resulting from strengthened financial commitments from federal, state, and local government agencies.

‘A Lot of Room for Backlash’

Ms. Vang has stuck with the Minneapolis organization for 20 years, a remarkable feat in the eyes of others who have taken on the challenges of the Hmong population. “There is a lot of room for burnout, and there’s also a lot of room for backlash,” says Naly Yang, the 27-year-old executive director of the Women’s Association of Hmong and Lao, in St. Paul. “She has been at it for so long, and that to me is very admirable.”

Ms. Vang began to shape the idea for her charity a few years after arriving in the United States.

In 1980, she took a job in Minneapolis as a Hennepin County interpreter for people who needed health care. “So many women who came to the clinic were bruised and crying and had no [English] language that they spoke and no job skills, no survival skills, and everyone was falling into a lot of stress and depression, and they had no place to go,” recalls Ms. Vang.

She and 14 other Hmong women banded together to volunteer in a basement office in a government building on the weekends. While providing child care, they showed other Hmong women where to go to meet basic needs, how to ride a bus, and how to clean their homes, among other things. The volunteers quickly saw that weekends were not enough to accomplish all that needed to be done.

“It’s a long-term thing,” Ms. Vang, 43, says they realized. “We were not able to continue to volunteer on the weekend because we had to work seven days a week.”

They contacted non-Hmong social workers to find out what it took to start a charity, found a lawyer who was willing to work free to help them obtain tax-exempt status under federal law, and found new donated space. They also talked with teachers, medical personnel, and a range of other professionals to design relevant programs for Hmong women.

Ms. Vang says that because she and the other volunteers were unfamiliar with the workings of nonprofit organizations in the United States, the assistance from non-Hmong professionals was vital. “We were asking for their wisdom and their ideas,” she says. “Whatever we tried to do, they were always there for us.”

Death Threats

But Hmong men in the Twin Cities were slower to show support. They accused Ms. Vang of trying to turn their wives into “bad persons” by giving them skills to become more independent of men, and they threatened her with death. Her own husband understood her dream, she says, although even today “sometimes he feels a little sensitive to it.”

To get the husbands inside the association offices, where they could see firsthand the kind of services the group provided, she invited the men to take courses in English as a second language alongside their wives. The plan worked. “It was just like a fire starting to die down, and the organization started to become more peaceful,” she says.

Flourishing Finances

With peace came money. Ms. Vang’s budget has grown from $40,000 in state funds the group’s first year to a projected $1.2-million from government and private sources this year.

Government money accounts for about 60 percent of the total, paying for programs to strengthen families, improve health, and prepare women for jobs. Foundations, including the local Bush, McKnight, and Minneapolis Foundations, provide about 30 percent of the budget. A non-Hmong consultant helps the group with grant proposals. When a proposal deadline is not too close, Ms. Vang says, the group tries to meet with foundation officials to “share with them our needs and problems.”

Jane Kretzmann, a senior program officer at the Bush Foundation, in St. Paul, says Ms. Vang isn’t pushy, but she is forceful. “She is not an outgoing glad-hand,” says Ms. Kretzmann, “but she is definitely willing to speak up.”

Bush has given the association six grants since 1989 totaling $350,000, largely because of its executives’ confidence in Ms. Vang. “She has a vision,” says Ms. Kretzmann. “She’s very forward-thinking. She wants women to have a voice. She wants women to have support.”

Donations from local Hmong businesses and individuals make up the remaining 10 percent of the association’s budget, and most of that money comes in response to two annual fund-raising events. In early fall, the group holds an event in a community center that allows potential donors to hear more about the organization and its most pressing needs while being treated, along with their families, to Hmong food and dancing. With six other Hmong groups, the association also throws a Hmong New Year’s festival, featuring a talent show, in a local hall each November.

Hmong people, who still struggle to make a living in the United States, almost always give money when asked, but the amounts are generally in the $20 to $200 range, Ms. Vang says. The biggest gifts come from Hmong-owned companies and Hmong entrepreneurs who are finding success in the United States, she says, and they are most persuaded by details about all the group is doing to serve Hmong women and their families.

The association no longer offers English classes, but it provides job training, including preparation to become a licensed day-care operator; Hmong-English interpreters, who help clients obtain a variety of social services; education in rearing children; leadership training; teenage-pregnancy prevention; and Hmong cultural activities for kids.

In a program called First Steps for Women, staff members take Hmong women grocery shopping to teach them how to read labels and to understand expiration dates and how food should be stored. They bring the women to McDonald’s to show them how to order a meal, and they take them to police and fire stations to teach them about handling emergencies.

Almost every day a woman contacts the office for help with a physically abusive husband, and a number of instances over the past few years in which Hmong family violence culminated in murder has put Ms. Vang on high alert.

She tries to help women and men work out their differences, and resorts to shelters, police, and lawyers only in rare instances. The U.S. legal system is too far removed from the Hmong clan structure, which involves a leader who oversees all relations, to feel acceptable to most Hmong. “I have to keep the culture in balance,” explains Ms. Vang. “We have so many ways we can work it out.”

By remaining neutral and helping men and women talk through problems — even when a husband has committed bodily harm — Ms. Vang says she is usually successful at stopping the violence and keeping couples together. Ms. Vang says getting involved in people’s complex personal lives has made it impossible to keep normal working hours. At home, she fields calls late into the night from people she has helped and others who were given her name by friends.

The job necessitates a great deal of patience and perseverance, whether it is leading a caravan of 15 cars filled with Hmong women to a picnic, or seeing that a single mother does not starve herself and her five children because she cannot find work or navigate the government bureaucracy to obtain public assistance.

Despite the long hours, Ms. Vang has several other responsibilities to which she says she is devoted. She and her husband, who sells insurance, have five children, ages 16 to 27, plus a foster son, and are grandparents to five more. And Ms. Vang spends much of her time offering her nonprofit experience to individuals and groups outside the association.

She travels to China, Korea, Laos, and Thailand to help people in those countries improve the lives of women and children, and she works with Hmong leaders around the United States to help set up organizations modeled in part on her own. The first national conference of Hmong women leaders, organized largely by Ms. Vang, is planned for next October in St. Paul. She also chairs two collaborative efforts by Minnesota nonprofit groups to meet the needs of refugees and immigrants.

The work, Ms. Vang says, is exhausting, but it also gives her strength. In typical Hmong fashion, she compares the way she handles its demands to the rebounding characteristics of nature. “It is like a tree,” she says. “You bend the tip down all the way to the ground, and you have to go right up again.”

LY VANG, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF HMONG WOMEN IN MINNESOTA

Age: 43

Place of birth: Laos

Education: Attended the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities for two years.

Previous employment: Worked as a nurse in Laos and then, in Minneapolis, as an interpreter and counselor for people seeking health care.