thank you yes this is not going to be just a listening session actually we're going to have a conversation and so i want to thank all of you for inviting me  i know that we're all getting food and we're all getting to know each other so i'm going to make this as lively as possible i'm here to talk a little bit about my organization i think it's really important when my friend and i ta organization that started mostly people started it but in madison there's not a lot of large population is only about seven thousand at that time and so i kind of knew that even though there  were so even though i knew that even though there was only seven thousand like eventually we would have to work with other races and then the other thing is when i started free to make i was very young and so we wanted to like do something for young people but we also knew that there was a mum population that was very much a much older population that i also knew that young people really needed space to go and so today freedom inc is a nonprofit that works with mo young kids in elementary school we also work with elders who are about fifty five and about eighty we also work with victims of domestic violence we work with the victims of sexual violence and we also work with  this organization that kind of encompasses like everybody and solved today my lessons that i want to share with you all is how do you start as an organization that serves only one population and become really inclusive where everybody feels like this can be a place for me also and so i'm going to show you a little video of freedom inc i've always kind of known that i was going to be different i had this opportunity to go to thailand to go see the world and i thought like my life had changed so much for coming back from thailand and she came back and realize there are certain things that change it's are things that didn't change and the words that didn't change were so still hanging on the parking lot i thought to myself and i have way too much and way too much effort not do anything our work is truly in creating the world that we want to live in freedom isn't for me about destruction freedom for me was a lot about love so as long as i'm alive like i'm going to created and if it's not created for me like and these my child will get to experience something and so with that belief like i fight so that's our story and that's how we became a mon and black organization if you can see throughout the united states there isn't a lot of asian and black unity or  but as you can see we made it work and i'm going to tell you a little bit about how we made it work and it wasn't a pretty process i can tell you that the challenges was that we both came from very  different histories or her stories and that while some of us came as refugees and war torn countries many of the african americans and black folks have been living in the us through oppression and slavery and a lot of turmoil but one two communities are stacked on top of each other because when we came to the u s as hmong folks we were not giving infrastructures to succeed we were actually placed in some of the poorest neighborhoods throughout the united states and so with that we were living side by side and on top of communities of color latinos black african americans but we did not speak to each other and so in fact we didn't understand each other's histories we didn't understand each other struggles one of the biggest challenges was also my community along with many communities in the in the world in in in america were very anti black they from growing up side by side living in the same neighborhoods we were taught not to talk to black people we're actually don't go outside it wasn't americans would take you the black folks would take you like in so in creating it's true this is how we grew up in creating this anti blackness in our community we further separated our communities then the other thing is of course black folks didn't understand us either so there was  this back and forth conflict between our communities and then the third thing is that there was a lot of different struggles that we struggled with then poor communities we struggle differently and so what we learned as  that what i'm going to share with you all today is just how different those struggles look like so for example when we were among people were talking about poverty and what that looks like for us a lot of our elders talked about gardens and how they missed their homeland and how they missed to farming and how they missed eating their own food and then in madison wisconsin what poverty looked like for black people was they talked about housing they talked about being evicted they talked about living in the streets they talked about not having family support to have a place to live and so one we got together though we knew that our struggles were different we didn't know how to like help each other and so from the beginning i said there's not a lot among people in madison we have to create an organization where the old the young those differently abled those who identify different genders those who were queer or l g b t identifying and those women and children who were sexual survivors and domestic violence victims and survivors could come and that place would be a place that i i dreamt of a place where i wanted to live in a world that i wanted to grow up in and so that place this community organization became that place in my head in my heart and around me if you could think that way you couldn't be around and so this became an organization that really like loved that those beliefs and so let me tell you a few of our challenges when we first started working together when we first started to work together even suffer expressions were really hard for people so we had a staff meeting because there were so a lot of disagreements between the home staff and the black stuff and the black staff were command and they would say i need to share with you i'm really mad about so and so they did this to me and i want to tell you all about it and then they had that space and then we would go to the mon folks and we said do you have anything to say is there anything wrong and they would look at each other and say no everything's ok and then we would step out of the room and everybody would come to me and all the blacks would say hey that was a beautiful like healing space i'm so glad that i felt like i was heard and i felt like i could tell my story then the moment after a mop and say oh my gosh that was the worst meeting ever they said i couldn't even say nothing and i didn't feel like i could express myself what are we going to do and so what i started to think about was how are we going to ever get together when we can't even communicate the same things when one of my black sisters expressing herself or their self and my mom sisters thinking that she's in in the jungle somewhere because even the communication was different and so we had to find a middle ground and i can tell you that when we were going to find this middle ground we lost a lot of people along the way so a lot of my mom staff quit because they felt like i was catering too much to the black staff and a lot of my black staff quit because they didn't feel like i was supportive enough and what i did was it was ok those that could not come on their journey could leave and they could join us later but that there was a group of us that were committed to each other because we knew that our liberation was tied to each other and when i say liberation i will tell you what it means it means living in places where cockroaches are there's an infestation of cockroaches in your living your buildings it means not having enough food for your children it means that there's cops all over and people are getting arrested for minor poverty crimes and so we had a lot in common we just did not speak about it in that way and so when i said we have to see it that if they when we win if they're free and we're free that's the only way that we're going to be able to move forward and so getting in my staff to like really see that was really important so i say to you all that yes a lot of people have left but a lot of people have joined and so it was it was a decision to be made and then the other thing that i want to share with you all that a lot of the work that i had to do was within my own community we had to dis  mystified what blackness was and it was about talking to my own family it was about talking to kids was about talking to my own communities about what it was about our fears of blackness right and it was some something as simple as having my mother go i don't want you to date a black person and then i'm like mom like people don't want their kids to date us either like you know that's not just one way or having i'm other say like don't go outside the black folks are going to get you do you know your grandsons half black like that's not something you should talk about and so it's just like really like getting my people to really understand that we all just want the same thing and we want quality of life for people right and so and then monica my company d she couldn't make it today but she can talk to you about the things that she had to do with black folks that were in the organization that to help them understand where my own folks were coming from and so today what i want to tell you all is that we all suffer but we suffer differently and it looks different in different communities what i want to teach you all today  about our lessons learned is that we were fighting for we were fighting against poverty and how it looked and how it surfaced looks very different so again for the month folks it was how food access to land for food and then for the black folks it was access to land for housing and so what i'm going to show you next is this video that we fought together to create a community garden not for selling food but for elders who could not walk and who did not have access to transportation so these were predominantly elders and it was black youth and black folks who like at the end really came in and so i can tell you that this this fight was for a  garden in a really wealthy neighborhood by a lake and the wealthy white folks were like we don't want you here and so and so then they were saying we can ship you out  we can bus you to like a mile away or two miles and you can do it there or fifty miles out of the city and it was the black folks who came and said there's something races about busing and we have experienced that it was the black folks who said no you're not going to do that to them because it was too hard for us as hmong folks to speak because it was so painful that they didn't want us in that community and so for the housing piece what happened was there's a lot of people who were homeless or couldn't get housing and during the housing boom and bust a lot of renters or owners lost their rental properties and their homes and so it was during this whole movement to like put homeless families into homes and so while them home folks like just gave up and said i don't want to fight the banks anymore left their properties and we said there's a lot of homeless families with children who need places to live and so then we moved a lot of african  american single mothers into these homes and they would stay as long as they could until the banks came to get the property but it was a joint conversation and and working together between families and black families and so the video that i'm going to show you we actually won this property it's on lake front and a lot of the moment holders who could not walk could not go anyplace started to use this and now this is the model for madison wisconsin about sustainable food and about community gardens this is what the mayor is going around the country talking about what sustainable food and access to food looks like the site that you're going to see is at a low income housing property in madison wisconsin at first they were just dumping everything into that and then there was like people living around that and the elders just said we're tired of looking at that like we live here the property managers have to go home but we live here the dumpsite that becomes our view we want to get rid of it and so an activist took it over and let's clean it up let's make it into herbal medicine garden for the people living there then there was a property across the street and it was like lakefront property and all of the wife folks were like no you can't garden here and say we're going to garden right there because the folks here can't walk and can't go anywhere so we made it accessible and we made it prioritize we prioritize elders and folks with physical disabilities and so and then we also gave made sure that there was a plot for young people to go co guardian with the elders and they can teach each other and then the piece about african americans in the mon piece was that there is history between why the land for african americans in this country because of the history of free labor and slavery a lot of our black folks are like we don't want to work in the hot sun like what is that right and so the home folks to like really have conversation and really getting our youth to understand and getting back to the land and things like that so it became a learning opportunity and now they get to say shop our land if it's public we get to control and say what happens to that land then they identified two other places where they can grow food to eat because these are like low income communities that didn't have access to la and this really show like young people like doing their part and like helping their elders and their grandma and their  so that was just to show you all a little bit of our work together young old those who are disabled those who are differently able those who are gender nonconforming those who are straight those who are not you know so i think that there's like there was a lot to learn throughout the united states like i'm telling you all that it's really hard to find people who actually work on the ground together and really build community and soul i hope that this little presentation gives you something to think about to take back with you and when you're farming you're thinking about your neighbors and when you're you have access to food you're thinking about who might need it and it may it doesn't have to be from your community it could be other people from other communities and so the next part of this conference i would like to split us up where i would like to maybe just like around your tables like have a conversation about what you thought and what what helps you to think differently what you're going to take away from this p