Cultural sensitivity and Community-Engaged Research

Speakers

This webinar features members of Bảo Vệ Collective. Bảo Vệ Collective is a group of grassroots community organizers working to empower Vietnamese youth in creating equitable communities. It aims to be a space for people to come together and build resources to help sustain the health of their community.

Y Vy Truong (she/her)
Public and Community Engagement

Y Vy Truong is a second-generation Vietnamese settler residing and working on the lands of the three title-holding nations: xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), skx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlílwətaʔ/sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh), as well as the lands of the Qiqéyt (Qayqyat) First Nations. She is the Community and Public Engagement Coordinator of Bảo Vệ Collective, which she co-founded with her two friends and colleagues, Mimi Nguyen and Kathy Thai. When she isn’t reciting speaking notes before a discussion panel or stewing over her diasporic angst, Y Vy enjoys reading zines and independent art books that inspire new cultural narratives on identity and history. Passionate about information justice, digital literacy, and community centred research, she is currently pursuing her Masters of Library and Information Sciences (MLIS) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She hopes to deepen her research on topics that centre the experiences of racialized immigrant communities and digital equity.

Mimi Nguyen (she/her)
COVID-19 Project Lead

Mimi’s history with the diasporas has consistently pulled her into community work that’s been geared towards what she has later learned to be reconciliation with intergenerational trauma. After being heavily involved in previous Vietnamese Youth Organizations, she expanded her work to visual storytelling where one of her film projects about the fraught political identities in Vietnamese diasporic communities, created with friend and colleague Kathy Thai, was featured locally at VAFF and internationally at the Vietnamese Film Festival in LA. While navigating through the creative world in film and marketing, she has worked as a Community Consultant on behalf of the City of Vancouver to facilitate by-law changes for equitable outcomes. Now she is the COVID-19 Project Lead at Bao Ve Collective, working alongside co-founders Kathy Thai and Y Vy Truong. 

kathy thai (they/she)
Design and Communications

kathy thai is a word-juggling colour wizard. kathy is also a second-generation Vietnamese person, who resides and works where their parents took refuge: on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples – xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and Qiqéyt (Qayqayt) First Nations. To clarify, kathy's work has always, in one way or another, involved the written and/or spoken word as well as the aesthetics that frame and complement them. Whether they're focusing their lens on an oral history project, designing a community publication, or, in the case of Bảo Vệ Collective, specializing in Design and Communications and working as a co-founder with Mimi Nguyen and Y Vy Truong, kathy works with inclusion and community in mind. 

About Bảo Vệ Collective

Bảo Vệ Collective is a group of grassroots community organizers working to empower Vietnamese youth in creating equitable communities. The collective began in late March 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, where they launched bilingual Vietnamese/English resources on federally funded financial aid programs such as Employment Insurance (EI) and the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB). In this time, BVC also became involved with inter-community initiatives such as C19Help, a collaborative multilingual project with hua foundation, Tulayan, Sulong, and UBC Asian Canadian Asian Migration Studies department (ACAM), providing COVID-19 related resources in four different languages. BVC also collaborated with hua foundation and VanCity Credit Union to provide information to small business owners on federal subsidies and programs.

The Collective consists of co-founders Mimi Nguyen, Kathy Thai, and Y Vy Truong whose friendships have been rooted in asking questions on what it means to be born and raised in the diaspora on the traditional, ancestral, unceded, and occupied territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the three title-holding Nations: xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), skx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlílwətaʔ/sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh). They hope that their work will help build healthier learning spaces for younger diasporic youth to explore and reconcile with their identities which can be fraught as a result of their fragmented histories.