all of you today i was hesitant to be honest because even though i always have a lot of opinions and a lot of things to share  tiny garden and i can hardly keep up with but i'm hoping that what i have to say today is still relevant for many of you who who are  farming now and after some thought i did feel that i could share my own journey here about farming and also if nothing else that i hope that i can offer some ways of thinking about the future in order for all of us to be more successful and and then really doing that with greater intention for for us to kind of create though the world that we want to to be a part so what i'm going to talk about today is what can we do to prepare for a more successful future and before i speak about that i want to just talk a little bit about who i am and to share some something personal about me but also to talk about me professionally and then secondly to share thoughts about the future and really because we're here in minnesota what what is our starting context right and then some concepts about what i think is important for us not to be reactive and in doing the kind of work that we want to do but how we might be able to do that with greater intention so i was born in a tiny village in laos many of the people in here were two and as a child i came to america so many of you know  many of the people in this room may know about the moment history and since about was the keynote speaker yesterday i'm sure she mentioned that twenty fifteen marks the fortieth anniversary of  arrival and other southeast asian americans coming to america so i just want to share start off sharing a little bit about that journey so life in for  laos is very different than here in america we are an agricultural people people farmed for subsistence they didn't really farm to make a lick they farm to live but it wasn't even enough to actually make a living and we lived in very rote remote rural villages so the urban coming here to urban centers is something that is very new and that's why st paul is so well known across the world because it's the largest urban concentration of monk anywhere in the world even though the largest population of monks live in china they don't live in urban centers and people lived around their families or extended families so villages are where people live really are the heart and soul of who they are as a family so it's not just many americans that don't know a lot about the moment during the what we call the vietnam war but in southeast asia they call the american war so today the vietnam war feels like it's history and there's often a lot of resentment when we talk about the needs of the community today because it does forty years ago might feel like inch in history so people feel like well you know why don't those people just you know figure out how to be in america and people don't have a lot of perspective and so it's not just americans who don't really know this history about the people but also are young people who don't know very much but the mome were involved with the u s during the vietnam war because they lived a new neutral country and nobody was supposed to be in laos everybody was in  so more than six sixty thousand american soldiers died but over one hundred thousand people died during this war and this is of course the famous pao and that young boy is my father so in one nine hundred seventy three when american soldiers returned home america really disengage and at the same time over one hundred twenty five thousand vietnamese americans also left vietnam so this is me when when when i was six and this is what i my family came there were three waves of among refugees the first wave was the mid seventy's to the early eighty's and those were military families so the family that had high priority for resettlement into this country and my family came to chicago in one nine hundred seventy nine in the mid as winter was just starting so you can imagine the shock  i had never seen snow before and i had never seen an elevator before anything like that and i remember standing as a six year old in front of an elevator and looking at people go in and then the door would close and you know a couple seconds later the door would open and new people would come out and i thought oh my gosh this is what you do and america if you want to change you just go in there so so you can imagine the shock right i was a six year old child and that's what i thought and of course when i told my mother she she you know she had never been in an elevator but she knew enough that people didn't change just by going into an elevator so that's so the second wave of people that came to america came in the early to the early eighty's to the early ninety's and those were really the second wave of resettlement where people are already had relatives here so many people followed their families and were resettled in areas where because the goal is to try to get all of us into the workforce as quickly as possible and even though my family as you can see in my father was involved in the conflict for so long you know the thought of actually trying to assess how people were doing first and supporting them was not really something that was thought about so my father went straight to work the week after we got to america and he did that because we he had an older brother who was working at the solo cup company in chicago and he got him a job and he just went to work and then my mother started taking english classes and she took all of us to her english class so so everybody knew know that in america you could no longer farm right you needed to find and make money in order to  survive what's significant also about the southeast asian resettlement is that it was the largest wave of refugee resettlement to this country and it really shaped how the u again just my family and chicago a couple years after we came so my siblings and i with my mother so not so different from many americans my family when i asked my mother about why they wanted to come to america she shares that you know they didn't know very much about america but they wanted a better life for their children they had heard that here their kids could go to school and things like that and then they wanted to be free from oppression right they were so fearful about their lives and so they wanted to be in a country where they felt like they would have some freedom and then you know my mother always says you know you want to be in a place where you can be useful people don't go to an area just to ask for help they're really thinking about what it is that they can do to be useful to the world and often unfortunately we don't start on building on people's assets and so having worked in the community for a long time i often wonder what it would have been like if if we had taken really good stock of the kinds of skills that my family and other refugees and immigrants bring to this country in order to you know get them the kinds of jobs where they could use those skills more easily so to do this farming was a really big part of our family's history and we started farming the year after we got to america just on a church plot and that was not to earn income but it was really to so that my parents could grow of the things that they wanted to eat you can imagine in one thousand nine hundred eighty there wasn't a lot of things that we see in the grocery stores today or the farmers market so my parents really wanted to you know have some of their vegetables and my mom came even though we came with like one bag she carried some seeds with her so they planted what they call among cucumber zen monk corn and i never knew the difference i mean now i know but then i was like what do you mean monk corn like that's different than you know other kinds of corn and then by the time i was in junior high we were traveling to iowa and wisconsin to de ta corn or to farm gin singh and things like that and then by the time i got to high school we were doing cucumber farming and all the money that we made were would go to a family pot right so i didn't know that you know other teenagers got allowances i just thought that you know you made you make money and then it goes to the family plot and i think when you are new to a country well we weren't so new by then but when you were still poor i think everyone thinks about don't think about money in the same way so i don't think i got my own allowance until i was eleventh grade and at the end of the season my mom gave us each one hundred dollars and we're like that's amazing where do we going to do so i know that in this room there are many similar stories and so given this kind of history and this kind of journey i know the resilience that resides in the room and how much people want to have a better life in america so what is it that we can all do better to ensure that we do we have some chance of success especially here in minnesota so i want to just switch a little bit and talk about what is our starting place in minnesota right especially for immigrants and minorities in this state and for a long time i really thought that it was just me that i couldn't figure it out or that it was my family if they were just more my parents if they were just more educated but we do have some real challenging conditions in minnesota that i think it's really important for all of you to know you don't have to know the specifics but i think it would be good if you had a starting sons of what's actually happening here in minnesota as well right so as we think about the future one thing to know in minnesota is that we are getting more diverse so people often think it's just in the twin cities but all over the state we have growing diversity and that diversity is being fueled  by people coming from all over the world and not just those of us who came as refugees even though in minnesota there are still many refugees but there are many immigrants from all over the world  who are changing the face of minnesota as well so even though minnesota's urban areas are more diverse than its role areas it's also quickly changing because we happen to live in a state that has a lot of economic opportunities and that brings a lot of people both highly educated but also those who want opportunity and so  the second fact is that minnesotans are aging and retiring in particular whites are growing older and in the next decade we're going to see the largest transition of people in the workforce in the white community that are going to retire in on this chart what's interesting is the green there green color represents people of color and the red color represents whites and you can see from the age that the majority of the young people are people of color right so as we have aging population  that is more white we have a young population that is more people of color so it really matters what we're going to do with each other right because a lot of our children and us we are going to be responsible for taking care of the retiring community so it's projected that by twenty twenty older adult population will grow from seven hundred one hundred one hundred fifty thousand to one point four million people right and then the working age population will remain steady at about three and a half million people so that means you're going to have a much many more older people and then not really a lot of new workers but a lot of those new workers are going to be people of color  also minnesota has some of the worst disparities between whites and people of color right and this is along almost every benchmark including income education  housing all kinds of benchmarks and so as a state if you guys follow politics right after the president's state of the union address political came out with this rating of states minnesota came out on top right as the number one state in the country and but when you compare it to how how much how minnesota ranks among other states in terms of along a whole bunch of other benchmarks in terms of disparities we are at the bottom if you can believe it so i know this is this not something new for many of you but it's important for us in this room to know to understand because we are part of the solution to that i believe you are all here today because you not only want to be successful but you want to be able to access opportunities and find resources so that we can bridge that disparity and what we do with each other is going to be crucial to helping move those so i want to just talk a little bit about the future and some ways to think about how we problem solve for the future so i consider myself a social entrepreneur and that just means that i'm really and optimists and to me it's about the future so what i often use in my work with community is really too simple but also complex concepts right one is really that the world is strengthening and we're increasingly more global so it's interesting this is just a map of people on facebook it doesn't follow it it's not meant to follow the map but it kind of resembles the map of the world and people are more connected than ever i can't tell you how many of my aunts and uncles who are on facebook who are connecting to their relatives in laos  or you know just connecting everywhere right so this is a great benefit to all of us because it's facilitating a lot of relationships that people want to maintain but people are also forming many new relationships right and this is really important because one of your most important assets as a person is the relationships that you have right and when we come to minnesota or any when we go to any new place what we take with us is those sets of relationships and then also our ability to form many new relationships and we have to do that because those relationships are essential to our success and this is also really important because even here in minnesota we can see how the global connectivity of the world and that's facilitated by us all being here coming here but also by how minnesotans are connecting to the world and it's really changing our palates rain i mean i find mangosteen which for a long time i had to just go to new york to even taste and now i can find it in you know grocery stores right so we have access to food that  we probably shouldn't have and then but it's also changing the way that americans consume food and what is becoming popular in terms of like restaurant tours and some of the most young talented chefs are chefs who are coming from other countries in ethiopia korea that are really changing the landscape of  what minnesotans are tasting in their mouth so this is really important for local diversity the second concept is really what i and many people call social innovation and so i want to just break that down a little bit and social innovation is because the world is changing so fast past success no longer dictates future success so there's a couple of things to keep in mind as we all do work our work and so social innovation is really about finding a new way to grow wiser right so we can be do the things that we need to do to be as successful as possible so one thing is we can no longer just wait for someone to tell us they answer and we have to think about in this case who you are producing your food for you have to get to know your customers more and i say this because i know how uncomfortable it is when you don't speak english and you have to think about how do i talk to somebody  customers if you sell at the farmer's market and you have customers that are coming and they're just looking at your vegetables but there are your primary consumers and if you never in gauge them then you don't really know  they're thinking you know what else they would like to see what they think about your vegetables and all of those things so social innovation really is three simple concepts which is that you have to be people centered right you can't just work really hard working really hard is important but if you don't know the people that you're producing for that can be a restaurant that can be you know the customers at the farmer's market your product is not going to be a successful right the second is to collaborate and while you guys are all doing that by being here is to  think about how you're going to work with many others because no one person has all the answers and so it's better to think about well who has this resource or who would have an idea for this that i can ask or who's the expert on seedlings or who's the expert on you know something that can help me think through this so we have to be much more willing to ask for help and to really collaborate and then the third is to be experimental and this concept is really about trying a new idea for example i often read and i know this because i'm on a much more western american diet which means i'm consuming a lot of meat and not enough vegetables and it shows in my health and a lot of our traditional diets are much more healthy right but people don't know how to make it so you know what if we were much more intentional about being able to produce the kinds of vegetables that are you know not only organic or local or all of those things but we teach the world how to eat more traditional food right like the ways in which we used to eat and i i say that because i have the same challenge with my mother who thinks my my child needs a western diet and so she cooks something separate for her but then she'll cook a traditional dish for herself and i said i would rather that she eat that dish than then the dish that you are cooking for her but somehow in our heads we've got we have gotten to the point where we think our food is not as good or children don't want to eat that right so we're learning now that actually vegetables are very important we should be consuming probably about twenty percent less meat than we are now and and  actually cooking them in the traditional ways in which we were cooking them is much healthier so how do we experiment bringing those knowledge and wisdom that we have a new market that we have here right so what i want to say is we're going to just try a quick exercise because my time's up so i just want you to think for yourself what's one group of customers that i want to hear from this year ok and how can you hear from them so even if like you put a certain weight survey box next to your stand and they write in english it's ok because you can try to find someone to interpret that right just like you know ask a question so you get to know the people who are picking up your stuff or if you happen to a producer that produces for our grocery store ask them why they've chosen to buy from you how do you get to know all that consumer base a lot more so just think about that for this year trying to make it simple what's one group of customers that you really want to hear from this year and then who's the one person or organization that you want to meet to discuss an idea in people always feel like they have to know the answer before they go and talk to somebody but actually all you have to want to do is to go and ask and say hey i have this idea what do you think so just think about that and be intentional so you connect with somebody and today is a great place because you're already here so don't just go and ask them please teach me and just say i have an idea for this what do you think or what can you help me with right  and then lastly if you have a new idea put it out there and say i want to try this what if i offer this and you know with this or you know anything so the point is you don't have to know the answers before you ask these things but you need to put your ideas out there so that other people can offer you know if they have some resource for you they can say here go talk to this person or a great maybe you apply for this loan write or things like that so what's one new idea that you have that you want to just put out there and just say i don't know i don't know what will happen but here's what i've been thinking about right so so if you kind of answer these three questions it is essentially what i talked about which is how do you stay socially innovative for the future because we can't just follow the past recipes for success they don't work for the future because things are changing too quickly right now you don't just rely on the news in fact i don't have cable because i know more about the world just by reading things on twitter or listening to you know radio programs that now i have access to because of internet and things around the world it's a much more reliable source so you also have that opportunity so i hope that's been useful and i thank you again for allowing me to be a part of your day thank you