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Sissy Nga Trinh is the Founder and Executive Director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance (SEACA), a Los Angeles-based nonprofit focused on community organizing among Southeast Asian youth. Sissy was a 2002 recipient of an Echoing Green Fellowship that helped propel her work, and her experiences as a young, refugee nonprofit founder offer valuable insights for others considering taking the start-up plunge. She was interviewed for Idealist by Rory Van Loo.

I grew up in L.A., and there weren't a lot of programs for youth or teens that were representative of who I was. I felt very isolated growing up as a Southeast Asian youth who didn't come from an upper middle class background. That was one of the reasons I wanted to create SEACA: there wasn't really anything out there targeting these populations. Most community organizing tends to target African-Americans or Latinos, and a lot of folks tend to think that Asian-Americans are well off—doctors and engineers and "model minority" types. But that definitely was not my experience.

I can probably count on one hand the number of organizations that do social justice work with Southeast Asian communities. And I'm not just talking about Vietnamese, which is my background, but Thai, Cambodian, and Lao communities where one in two people are living below the poverty line. There are huge gaps. On the one hand, most social justice groups say, "Asian-Americans aren't a priority. They're not poor, they're not struggling," and mainstream Asian-Pacific Islander organizations and college clubs focus mostly on issues like glass ceilings and affirmative action. Meanwhile, on the other hand, Southeast Asians have relatively low high school graduation rates and many of them are garment or factory workers earning below minimum wage. So it was clear that in order for any work to be done in my community, I needed to start something. There were not enough people committed to this issue to do something about it, and I couldn't expect people to come in from outside and set something up, so that's how SEACA got started.

There's a certain amount of truth to the Asian-American "model minority" thing, in large part due to this country's immigration policies. Up until about the 1950s there were many race-based bars on Asian immigration to the United States. That changed with the civil rights movement, but the new policies favored the educated classes. Except for those who already had family here, which was rare, Asians couldn't really come in unless they had some sort of professional background or financial resources. In the 1960s, masses from the professional classes left the Asian countries for the United States. Most of my Asian classmates' parents were part of that "brain drain," so their parents were doctors, engineers, teachers, and those kinds of folks. But it shifted again in the 1970s when all these Southeast Asian refugees came here fleeing communist regimes, wars, genocides—this huge mass of people suffering from mental trauma. A lot of those people came here with nothing.

My parents came here with what they had in their pockets, because they were carrying two little children in their arms. We didn't have family or friends to help us settle or find jobs. Imagine having to start from scratch without any sort of assistance. Because of that, we were on welfare for a number of years. When we first resettled in L.A., everybody lived in an apartment, everybody was on the school public lunch program, and I thought it was normal for everybody to share cramped living conditions.

"Why is it that we're on school lunch programs and my dad has to work all these hours and my family has to make all these sacrifices, when we seem to be good people, too?"

It's very typical for Asian parents to move out to the suburbs—if there's a good school district then they'll do it, even if it means 10 people in a three-bedroom place. After time, my dad moved us into my uncle's suburban house. All of a sudden at school, I was shocked: "You have your own bedroom? Your mom doesn't work? You get new clothes every year?" There were all these contrasts between what I started out with and going to school with all these kids. It was a huge eye-opener, and for the first time, I felt a sense of shame. I thought, "We live in a crappy house, I don't dress in nice stuff," and felt isolated because of it.

The neighborhood we moved to was predominately white. Even though I was six years old at the time, I got a sense that all the kids who got complimented for appearance were blonde-haired and blue-eyed; there was even a period when I wished I was blonde. I didn't necessarily think these people deserved the stuff they got more than I did, yet they had much nicer homes and a much higher standard of living. I wondered, "Why is it that we're on school lunch programs and my dad has to work all these hours and my family has to make all these sacrifices, when we seem to be good people, too? We don't steal, we don't do drugs or any of that stuff." I think that created a sense of class-consciousness in me, which at the time I didn't really understand.

At college, I remember thinking that a lot of the kids had so much money and no clue what it's like to be struggling. I was not only a full-time student taking a full course load but I was also working 20 to 30 hours per week and was a student activist. And yet there were kids complaining they had no time because of their schoolwork, when all they were doing was schoolwork. So I spent a lot of time in college just trying to get off campus.

My mentors helped me find resources away from campus about social and economic justice issues. I already kind of knew about a lot of this from my own life but what was great about college was learning about nonprofits—I had thought that to do social justice work meant you had to be a lawyer. Interning for KIWA (Korean Immigrant Workers Advocate) taught me there are other things you can do: You can be an organizer, you can be an advocate.

"In high school or college, you're not really taught that you can do social justice work and make a living at it."

In high school or college, you're not really taught that you can do social justice work and make a living at it, and that it doesn't have to be a volunteer thing. That was something they taught me at KIWA. At the same time it was frustrating because KIWA was focused largely on Korean workers. I didn't want to learn Korean, because there's not a shortage of Korean organizers; there's a shortage of opportunities for Korean organizers to do social justice work. Living in L.A., there was a lot of pressure on me to learn Spanish, and I actually thought about moving to New York or San Francisco at one point because there are more opportunities. But with the connections and knowledge that I built growing up in L.A., I felt that it would be such a waste, so I decided to stay.

I had done union organizing for a number of years and decided it really wasn't for me. When I was about 25, I decided I was tired of organizing other communities. There were other people that could fill my position, and I had knowledge of a particular ethnic group that wasn't being organized. A really big issue at that time was welfare reform. The vast majority of Asian welfare recipients—I think it was 90 percent at that time in L.A. County—are Southeast Asians, so welfare reform ended up hitting Southeast Asians the worst for a variety of reasons. There were a number of organizations hiring people to work with the Vietnamese community around issues of welfare reform, and I thought, "OK, I'll do that for a number of years and figure out the organizing piece at a later time."

I worked with APALC for three years doing community education and public policy around welfare, workforce development, pushing for better job training and placement programs, and universal access to health care for immigrant children. APALC was one of the only organizations doing public policy that visibly represented Southeast Asians, and there was a push among the staff to do organizing. But the organization is not designed to do community organizing; it's designed for legal advocacy and impact litigation. One day I was talking with my supervisor and we said, "Why don't we apply for an Echoing Green Fellowship and have APALC as the fiscal sponsor, and just see how it goes?"