Insights on Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Journey 5: How Self-Healing Can Be a Powerful First Step

To answer that, we need to look back to the 1950s. The Korean War resulted in ten million separated families—in South Korea alone, the war left half a million widows and tens of thousands of children displaced from their parents. An estimated thirty-six thousand American troops died, and as many as three million Koreans on both sides perished by 1953. (You can read more in Eleana Kim’s “The Origins of Korean Adoption: Cold War Geopolitics and Intimate Diplomacy.”)

I’m a product of the Korean War, US colonial and political interests on the Korean peninsula, gender inequality, deficient domestic policies, and a complex domestic and international adoption system.

My politicization around adoption—i.e., examining the history and complexity of adoption from a systemic perspective—led me to co-found the Network of Politicized Adoptees (NPA), which advances adoptee justice by telling our individual stories and collectively working toward systemic change.

I see myself as a community organizer within my own organization and in the field of philanthropy.

Before I co-founded NPA, I spent about 10 years as a community organizer around media justice, police brutality, and representation in the arts. The insights I gleaned while fighting against predominantly White institutions is useful to me now as I work within predominantly White institutions.

In my current role as the Foundation’s DEI manager, I lean on my experience as a community organizer. Some questions I’m continually asking include:

Who or what has power?
What is this person’s interest in advancing DEI? What does this person really care about?
Who or what would move this person along on the DEI journey?
Who or what can I leverage to advance DEI?
Who are my allies in advancing DEI?

Throughout the Foundation’s DEI journey, it’s my job to remind folks that we’re not just discussing abstract ideas. We’re working toward measurable change for the people most impacted by inequities.

My career in philanthropy has become a natural extension of my commitment to social justice.

It came as a bit of a shock to me recently to realize I’ve been working in philanthropy for more than a dozen years. I didn’t seek it. I fell into it by accident. My first foray into the field was with Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP), a network with a national membership from within and outside of philanthropy working to expand resources that support underserved AAPI communities.

I didn’t know what philanthropy was when I joined AAPIP. But I did know I was attracted to the campaign they hired me for—the National Gender and Equity Campaign, which built social justice capacity for Asian American nonprofits in California and Minnesota. At AAPIP, I learned from amazing leaders, including Peggy Saika, Bo Thao-Urabe, Alice Hom, and many others. When the National Gender and Equity Campaign ended, I was recruited by NWAF.

My first in-person interview at NWAF was with Ruby Azurdia-Lee, who was a program director at the time and who’s now the president of Comunidades Latinas Unidas en Servicio (CLUES). I knew I’d learn a lot from Ruby and from working at NWAF—and I have, first as a program assistant, next as a project coordinator and assistant to the president, and now in my current role as DEI manager. I’m constantly learning from my colleagues at the Foundation and in the field overall.

NWAF believes that embedding DEI across all core functions is imperative for organizational change.

The Foundation’s 2019 Annual Report shows how the start of our DEI journey included crafting a multiyear plan to transform our internal culture and organization, and why this is needed to model constructive change. The plan touches on all seven of our core function areas—which include grantmaking, human resources and organizational culture, communications, and leadership and governance, among others. Twenty-eight task-oriented steps are the center of this living plan that we’ll refine as we move forward with continuous progress and learning. It’s a concrete example of the internal action we’re taking to go all-in on DEI.

Across my DEI journey, healing continues to lead a path toward deeper connection.

Civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama said, “Life is not what you alone make it. Life is the input of everyone who touched your life and every experience that entered it. We are all part of one another.”

The more I delve deeper into my own healing, the more connected I feel to others who’ve experienced migration or displacement out of their control (often as a result of war or colonialism). The more I understand how connected we are, the greater my bond with those who’ve experienced a disconnect from their birthplace and culture, and with those who’ve felt isolated, as if they didn’t belong anywhere. These are my people.

They’re why I work to advance social justice and to ensure we all have the agency to make our own choices. It’s important to me to be a part of the change I seek in my professional and community work, and through it all, I find joy in learning about other peoples’ stories and seeing our shared pathways toward healing and liberation.