All posts tagged: Minnesota

Legacies of War Refugee Nation Twin Cities: 10 Years Later

Published by Staff

This October marked a quiet milestone for the Lao community in Minnesota, the 10th anniversary since the historic Legacies of War Refugee Nation Twin Cities exhibit in Minneapolis. The exhibition brought together teachers, artists, community builders, and families to understand Lao refugees’ experience, the poorly-understood Secret War in Laos, and the war’s long-term consequences.  This exhibit was a remarkable collaboration between the Lao community, Lao Assistance Center of Minnesota, local Lao artists, the Lao Student Association of Minnesota, Intermedia Arts, Pangea World Theater, TeAda Productions, and the advocacy organization Legacies of War. Many of the Lao community’s projects and successes over the last decade can be traced to lessons learned from this exhibit. In the 20th century, Laos had more bombs dropped on it than any nation during World War 2. More than two million tons of unexploded ordnance were dropped on Laos from 1964-1973 in violation of the Geneva Accords. An estimated 30% of the ordnances did not explode on impact, thus contaminating over 30% of Laos’s entirety with deadly bombs, some as small as a tennis …

Good Communities Come From Data Disaggregation

Published by Bryan Thao Worra

Even though we’ve come a long way, as Southeast Asian American refugee communities getting ready for our 45th year in the US, there are still many hurdles for us. Recently, the Chinese have been actively mobilizing to undermine the strides we’ve made by making national efforts to eliminate the collection of statistics and data so necessary to understand which policies have been effective in narrowing the educational achievement gap, and which have not. It should be obvious just saying it aloud: Good communities come from good data. In an era when everyone is concerned about the abuse of our social safety nets and education systems, as well as fake news, we should all be committed to gathering the most accurate information about our success and challenges. We should be more than willing to invest in the collection of data that ensures we’re seeing the real picture of how some communities succeed and others do not. Lao Minnesotans are among the many who have a direct stake in this issue. The phrase most commonly associated with …