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Michele Lew

Date: March 31, 2023
 Interviewer: Ellina Yin
 Interviewee: Michele Lew (1970 - )

Michele Lew is the CEO of the Health Trust, a nonprofit that ensures that health related grants, policies, and services exist to help give everyone the opportunity to be healthy ' especially the most vulnerable. Previously, she served as President and CEO of Asian Americans for Community Involvement (AACI) from 2005-2016, a nonprofit health and wellness organization.

Transcript of Michele Lew

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Timeframe 0:00 >> 4:42

Yes. Michele Elena Lew, born in Palo Alto, California. And my date of birth is February 11th, 1970.

(Interviewer) And your father's name and place of birth.

Henry Lew. He was born in White Plains, New York.

(Interviewer) And year of birth?

1935

(Interviewer) His education and occupation?

He is a retired cardiologist, so he did an M.D. at Boston University.

(Interviewer) And same with your mother.

So my mother's name is Winifred Tank Moy, and she was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She retired as a physicist and got a graduate degree in physics from MIT. Yeah, Yeah. No pressure, no tiger parents at all.

(Interviewer) And what year was she born?

1936 (Interviewer) And for your father's side, are you do you know your family's history of immigration and how they arrived in America?

So my grandparents, my father's parents emigrated from mainland China to the East Coast and then eventually the whole family made their way to San Francisco and settled in the Bay Area.

(Interviewer) And what year was it?

Uh, I don't know the exact year, but it would have been in the 19 late 1920s, early 1930s.

(Interviewer) And do you know what your your grandparents did for work when they first came here?

Classic Chinese immigrant workforce. Waiter, seamstress.

(Interviewer) And how about your mother?

Say, my mother's side came about the same time also from mainland China. And they came through Canada, through Toronto, and then settled in Massachusetts. And also very similar. They operated a laundromat and did some kitchen waitstaff work in Chinatown. No, my grandparents really didn't talk much about their upbringing and their immigration story. They spoke Chinese, they didn't speak English. I didn't really speak Chinese, only spoke English. So there was definitely a language barrier.

(Interviewer) And, do you have my siblings.

I have an older brother who lives in Mountain View. So I was born and raised in Palo Alto, California, and I try to tell people it was very different than it is today. It was a suburb, very few Asian people in town. I think when I was going to elementary school in Palo Alto, there was one other Asian kid in my class, but it was a very suburban, safe upbringing where families let their kids play outside and education was very important.

(Interviewer) And what did your family do during, like vacations or weekends?

Oh, you remind me. Your question reminds me. So we did have the luxury of traveling a few times to Hawaii during the summers, and we did one or two Europe trips during the summers. But one of my favorite memories is my father would take us two miles down the road to the local hotel swimming pool and sneak us in for free. And we did that for years as our summer entertainment until finally he got caught. So I was a latchkey kid in the 1970s. There were neighborhood kids on the block who we would play with after school every day and all day long in the summers. We were a generation where the parents called us home when it was sunset or it was time for dinner. But otherwise, we kind of roamed wild, rode our bikes around Palo Alto, built forts, got into a little bit of mischief, but really had a fun time.

(Interviewer) Did you interact with media like TV? Radio? You watch TV shows, me cartoons or anything like that?

Yes. So both my parents worked full time. And so my brother and I spent a lot of time after school on our own. And so TV was our friend. I'm not sure our parents realize how much we watched, but back then there were really only three TV stations. And so we watched a lot of ABC after school specials and movies. I am sure our parents would never want us to actually see us kids, but it was definitely a form of entertainment for us. I don't think I was aware that there were hardly anyone who looked like me on TV. Probably some of my earliest media memories were watching movies like The King and I or Flower Drum Song, but not really having much Asian awareness growing up in Palo Alto.

Timeframe 4:42 >> 9:03

We had a mix of childcare growing up. I would say sometimes, especially when we were young kids my parents hired at after school babysitter and we had a rotation of wonderful people who helped us out. When my parents had to travel for a few days, my grandmother, my father's mother would come and stay with us and my brother and I used to sort of laugh and grimace because the food that she cooked was very different than what we were used to eating. Some of it was delicious and some of it was probably not things we would choose, but we had a mix of both family and paid caregivers helping us out.

So I went to Crescent Park Elementary School, Jordan Middle School and Palo Alto High School, all public schools in Palo Alto. I would say 95 plus percent white, Caucasian for elementary school for sure. And then a little bit more diverse as the schools got larger and the demographics of Palo Alto started to change. So when I graduated from Palo Alto High School, I think there were probably a couple hundred mostly Chinese American kids out of school of 1600.

(Interviewer) And and as for teachers, as the demographic kind of the same as well, or.

Probably even more skewed toward white and Caucasian. I didn't have any mentors who stood out. I definitely had some high school teachers who took an interest and encouraged me, but there was not one go-to person outside of my parents who was an adult who I'd turn to. So as you might expect from having a parent who's a cardiologist and a parent who is a physicist, there was a lot of intense academic pressure from my parents as well as from within, and there was kind of a foregone conclusion that I would go to medical school and I thought that's what I wanted as well. And so I went through high school as a very academically driven kid. I was the Asian kid who stressed out about getting a B plus, horror of horrors. I got a B plus in physics, which was my mother's specialty, and she did not understand how that could happen. But there was a lot of academic pressure when I was going to high school.

One of the outlets for me was I started this club in part to help with my college applications and in part because it was an interest. It was I mentioned this club because it was called the Asian Cultural Exchange, and the name is more impressive than what we actually did. So what we would do is we would go buy cheap Chinese food and sell it on campus and take the profits and go out to have better Chinese food. But it was a fun social activity with friends. I made new friends through the club, and it was really the beginning. I think of my embracing of my Asian identity. Entrepreneurial, Yes. Geared around food, though, so yeah.

So like many, if not most of the Chinese kids growing up in Palo Alto at that time, my parents sent me to Friday night Chinese school, which was this two hour torture for most kids in Palo Alto. So my brother and I went we were one of the few families who did not speak Chinese in the home. And so we were always at the bottom of the class and sitting in the back row because we were the oldest and largest kids in our class. And really the highlight for us was our mother would take us to 7-Eleven after Chinese school so we could get a Slurpees. So that's the part we look forward to. But by going to Chinese school for years, every Friday, I got a little bit of a dose of Chinese culture. There were activities and songs, etc. and that was my formation outside of my family.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 9:03 >> 15:28

So after 18 years of growing up in a pretty small town of Palo Alto, I was dying to get away from home. And my parents had grown up on the East Coast, so they had always encouraged my brother and me to look at going to college outside of California, which I'm grateful for. I ended up going to Yale as a die-hard pre-med until I took freshman biology and chemistry in college. I still remember the day I called home to let my parents know that I had decided that pre-med wasn't for me, and I shared the news on the phone and there was just stony silence on the other end of the line. I am pretty sure they passed out. So to please and appease my Asian parents. I defaulted into becoming an economics major, which was a nice, solid, practical, moneymaking major for an Asian kid. So I graduated from Yale as an economics major, and then my first job out of college, I went to work for a bank in New York.

So when I went to Yale, I signed up for a pre orientation program a few weeks before school started that was geared toward what we called minority students at the time and participating in that program was life changing for me. I went to college feeling like I wanted to come as myself and be my authentic self, which I never felt like I had when I was in high school. And so I made that conscious decision and immediately made friends in this minority orientation program who have become friends for life. And it was maybe the first time I felt like, “Oh wow, I can be who I am with other people of color, and they accept me and I was making friends.” And it was just a really exciting time in my life. That pre-orientation program then evolved into my participation in the Asian Students Association on campus, which was kind of the core of my social group in school. And I spent a lot of time. There was a cultural house on campus for Asian Americans students. I have some laugh and cry memories of making late night wontons for large groups of people using a deep fryer in that house and attending Asian student conferences, organizing Asian student activities. That was a big part of my college life.

Going from Palo Alto to Yale was eye opening in many respects. And one of the things that I realized was that California was actually somewhat ahead when it came to race relations and multiculturalism compared to a school like Yale. In addition, the community that Yale was in, New Haven had a very small Asian population at the time. It was much more of a black-white dynamic. And so I learned a lot. My eyes were opened a lot, and it made me realize I don't really have any Asian American mentors or faculty members to look up to. They were very few Asian American faculty at Yale. I'm not sure if I ever had an Asian American professor. It wasn't something I craved at the time, but it was noticeable.

So I eventually left my crummy job at the bank, and I decided to go to public policy school. So I did a two year master's in public policy program at Harvard in the Kennedy School of Government. That was 1993 to 1995. So my first job after college was working at this bank in New York. The bank happened to be Lehman Brothers, which later went out in a giant ball of flames. Well deserved. I hated my job at the bank. I hated it from day one, and I was working 80 hours a week, didn't like the work, liked the people even less. But it made me really reflect on what did I want to do with my life. I'm eternally grateful for that experience because it made me realize that money was not the end all, be all for me in my professional life. I needed to have something more fulfilling than just making more money, especially making more money for a bank.

I looked back on my pretty short career at that time, and what I kept coming back to was this transformational summer internship I had had between my freshman and sophomore years in college. I worked as a summer intern for this hole in the wall Asian nonprofit in Boston, Chinatown, and just loved that experience. I would walk into Boston Chinatown every day and feel like I was home, even though I was this American born Chinese girl from Palo Alto. There was some sort of connection, perhaps because my mother's side of the family grew up in the Boston area. But I kept coming back to that and doing community service and realized going to public policy school was one way to get reconnected with that community service interest that I had had in college.

So when I was working at this Asian nonprofit in Boston, Chinatown, I worked on voter education and voter outreach. And this was many years ago. So rather than analyze the data by computers in a simple Excel formula, we literally printed out rolls and rolls of voter files and just looked for Asians surnames and reached out to people. And it was tedious. It was not particularly sexy or exciting, but it was rewarding, and I felt a real connection to the staff who worked at this Asian nonprofit and admired the work that they were doing.

Timeframe 15:28 >> 18:07

When I was graduating from college, I really didn't know what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be. So I just sort of followed the other economics majors and applying to these banking jobs. It seemed like the thing to do again, it seemed like something that my parents would be proud of, and I ended up landing this banking job, and it was just an easy way to transition out of school. When I was in college, I had this internship in Boston, Chinatown, and then the following year I got an internship to go to Japan and shadow people who were doing community service work in Japan. I had a couple of stops on that trip. One involved working with kids of Korean descent who were low-income and living in Kyoto, Japan, and it was an opportunity for me to see how discrimination against another Asian subgroup could be so damaging to an entire community. I also got to work with the homelessness population, homeless population in Osaka, and realized how there were so many invisible groups within Japanese society that people who lived in Japan might have never known existed and coexisted with them. And these were lifetime influences that have shaped my professional career since then.

So after seven years on the East Coast, this California girl was ready to come back home. I ended up getting a job in Southern California. I worked for UCLA as a program manager, working on education reform issues. And then after a couple of years in L.A., I realized I was ready to come back to Northern California, and I got a job as a program manager for a local San Jose nonprofit called Joint Venture Silicon Valley. So I joined Joint Venture in 1997 as an education program manager. At the time, Silicon Valley was in one of its heydays and joint venture, had 25 million bucks to spend on education reform. So it's a really exciting time to work on education here. My boss ended up moving into the philanthropic world. She got a job at the Carnegie Foundation in Menlo Park, and so I ended up following her to again do program management focused on improving the status of the K-12 teaching profession.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 18:07 >> 24:42

So when I moved back to the Bay Area, I was in my late twenties, I was single. I had just moved into my first apartment on my own in San Jose and I was looking for a way to get involved in the community. And somewhere along the way somebody told me, hey, you should check out this organization called AACI Asian Americans for Community Involvement, and so I went over to the 2400 Moorpark Building as a volunteer. I still remember being interviewed by the staff, and they asked me, do you speak any other languages? I said, No, I speak English. And I could kind of see in the back of their heads they're thinking, what are we going to deal with this gal? And they assigned me to volunteer at AACI's Asian women's home, and I thought, the kids will take pity on Michelle. They'll hang out with her; they'll play with her, which was true. And so I started out as a volunteer at the Asian Women's Home. I participated in a 40-hour training to work with domestic violence survivors, and that was my first involvement with CQI. Other than my parents getting the AACI newsletter in the mailbox periodically when I was growing up.

I spent a number of years doing education program management in the nonprofit sector in L.A. and here in Northern California. And then I had coffee with a friend, and I was ready to make my next professional move, but wasn't really sure what to do. And my friend reminded me I had gone to public policy school. She pointed out to me that there was a new member of the California state legislature who had just gotten elected. He grew up in Palo Alto. She said, Michelle, you grew up in Palo Alto. You got a degree in public policy. Maybe you should look at applying and working for this guy. So after doing nonprofit work, I transitioned to working for an elected official, a fellow named Joe Simitian, who had just gotten elected to the state legislature, and I worked there for about four and a half years. During that time in my work, I met a fellow named Paul Fong, who became one of my first mentors and really helped steer me into joining the AACI staff in 2005.

When I went to go work for an elected official, I knew I was pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I am an introvert by nature, and I knew taking this job, representing an elected official meant that I would have to go out and schmooze and network. And those were words that were not comfortable for me as an Asian American woman. But I knew it was a skill set I needed to learn. And so lo and behold, I took this job. But much of the job was representing my boss at Chamber of Commerce dinners, community meetings, neighborhood associations, farmer's markets, helping people understand the work of the state and the great work that my boss was doing. One of the best skills I learned in this time period was that I can now walk into any room of 100 people, and I can talk to anybody for an hour. Little did I know how important that skill would be when I eventually became a nonprofit executive director.

I really appreciate Joe Simitian, who was my boss because he was a mentor. I shared with him some of my discomfort with being in this role, and he gave me a very helpful tip, which was, Hey, Michelle, you don't have to be the expert and wax philosophical and give a speech every time you walk in the room, maybe set an incremental goal for yourself of just trying to ask one question when you go to a public meeting. And maybe you won't hit that goal every time, but the more you practice using your voice, the more comfortable it gets. And he was so right. And I can remember I actually still use this tip today of let's just try to ask one question. I don't have to be the expert. Just something I'm curious about and make sure that I am using my voice and people recognize that I'm in the room.

So Paul Fong changed my life. It's not an understatement to say that. In 2004, Paul encouraged me to get back involved with AACI. I had been a volunteer before, but I had gotten so busy with my work that I had stopped volunteering at the Asian Women's home, and it was Paul who reached out and said, Hey Michelle, you might want to think about joining the board of AACI, which I did in 2004 with his nudging. And Paul saw something that I had not seen yet, which is he knew that the executive director seat would likely be opening up at AACI. And in 2005, when I was ready to move on from to Joe Simitian’s office, with Paul's encouragement again, I applied to become the CEO of AACI and got the job. The first year at AACI was in credibly challenging.

As a first-time executive director, I went from managing a small office of kind of Type A go getter. Public servants want to be elected officials to a staff of 100 at the time, most of whom were clinicians. I was not a clinician has seen folks who had come from all different countries, who had all different backgrounds, and the learning curve was extremely steep. Paul was there to hold my hand, to guide me and mentor me in that critical period, and I had to restructure the organization. He was with me side by side, helping me, providing a steady, calm influence when I was working all day long, all night long, worried about work stress, trying to figure out this new job. And he really was pivotal in getting me through that first hard year.

Systems & Power Timeframe 24:42 >> 26:50

So I joined AACI as CEO in 2005. I was 35. I did what I think people always tell you, not to do, which is I changed jobs, and I moved and I got married all in the same year. And that probably contributed to my stress levels of being a first-time executive director. So in 2005, I went to my first AACI Board meeting as CEO. I had been on the board before, but this was my first time in the staff chair and like a lot of nonprofit boards, the board was talking about board recruitment. And one fellow around the table said, I don't even know why we have women on the board. And I remember in my head thinking like, wow, A, I can't believe people think that. And B, I can't believe people feel they can say that out loud. And I did not know how to respond to that. Fortunately, there was another board member in the room who recognized the damage in that statement, and he was the one who checked in with me, checked in with other board members who were women sitting around that table.

And then he reached out to that board member and called him and said, hey, this is not okay. We need to rethink whether this is the right board for you. That board member ended up resigning, but it has stuck with me. All these years. And even when I decided to leave AACI ten plus years later, I heard feedback afterwards that one of the board members then in 2016 said, oh, now we can hire a Chinese man. So this kind of misogyny sticks with me as I go through my own career and think about the next generation of Asian American women leaders to make sure that we have seats at all of the tables and that we have opportunities to lead.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 26:50 >> 33:14

I'm really proud to have been a small part of AACI’s journey over the last 50 years, and my leadership at AACI was heavily influenced by the people before me. And I love to watch what AACI is doing since I've left. One of the things I knew coming into AACI was its deep origins and community advocacy. I loved that one of the visions of the CQI founders was to get an Asian American on every commission and board in Santa Clara County. I thought that was brilliant and spawned generations of leaders from Mike Honda to Paul Fong to Evan Low to Margaret Abe-Koga. And that was something that I wanted to sustain and support while also recognizing that AACI had become this incredible direct service organization, helping thousands of residents through mental health counseling, primary care, health, domestic violence support services, youth services, and more. So I wanted to make sure that we maintained and grew both pillars of AACI, the advocacy side, as well as the direct service side.

So when I started out as an executive director, I think I took all the courses, all the leadership programs I could get my hands on because I knew I had so much to learn. So I was really a beneficiary of many community leadership programs as well as having the opportunity to work with an executive coach. When I first got hired at AACI, the board recognized that as a first-time executive director, coaching would be important, and I had to try out a relationship with a couple different coaches before I found the one. Turns out my coach was a white woman who had worked at the County of Santa Clara for many years, but she was so helpful in helping me connect with key community leaders. She had a bit of distance so she could help me analyze some of the internal challenges and internal politics of AACI. And in addition to Paul Fong, I really credit Ann Moses with helping me survive that critical year, one of being an executive director.

When I got to my ten-year anniversary at AACI, I thought that was a good time to reassess. Am I the right person to lead AACI for another ten years? I did not want to stay too long, and I thought at that time, Hey, I am not quite ready to leave, but I'm like, there's work I wanted to finish, but I also wasn't sure I wanted to be there at year 20. In that time period, my mother started to have some health issues and I was driving back and forth between Palo Alto and 2400 Moorpark multiple times a day, and it was becoming unsustainable. And I thought at this point I need to be with my family. And so I ended up leaving the organization. And in part, I was able to leave because I knew that there were multiple people within the organization who could lead AACI. And I'm so delighted that Sarita Kohli became the next CEO of AACI and has done a phenomenal job of leading the organization.

So when I left AACI in 2016, I took a job working for Stanford Health Care, which was close to home for myself and close to where my parents were living at the time. And once my parents were able to get squared away in a more supportive housing environment, I realized that maybe I had one more big job in my career and my husband gently sat me down and said, maybe the Stanford role isn't that big job. This was happening when President Trump was in office. He was ending DACA. Crazy things were happening in the United States, and I realized I missed the safety net world. I loved working at AACI and seeing the people that we helped every day when I walked up the stairs. And I was really missing that connection to helping people who really could benefit from the help. And so I ended in 2018, I joined the Health Trust.

One of the many things that I loved about AACI’s DNA was a deep value around empowerment and empowering others. I think AACI has built a groundswell of community activists in Santa Clara County who are Asian American, and it's something that has stuck with me. So when I was at AACI in the CEO seat, I had the opportunity to support other leaders within the organization, whether that was raising money to provide for professional development for our middle managers or encouraging some of our senior leaders to take leadership positions outside of the organization in their volunteer time. I really loved watching the growth of staff into community leadership positions. That's something that I have tried to continue in my professional career outside of AACI. So at the Health Trust, we have also really invested in staff development. We are hoping to help move our folks when they're ready to leave the Health Trust into other community leadership positions. And I give that credit to AACI. I think the AACI founders recognize, as nice as it is for people to stay at AACI forever, sometimes it's even better if our people go and become a department head at the county or they become the president of the board of another community organization, or they become the chair of the California Psychological Association. This is all good for the movement and for the community.

Timeframe 33:14 >> 36:18

So when I was working for Joseph Gideon in the State Assembly, Joe decided to run for the state Senate and Joe was very good about keeping his campaign operations and his state legislative operations separate. However, I happened to meet a fellow who was working on the campaign side, and he eventually became my husband. And so for a little while, I really was not comfortable with my personal life and professional life having such an intersection. And I still remember Joe Simitian calling me into his office one day and asking me point blank, Michele, are you dating John Kessler? And squirming in my chair, admitting and blushing and saying, yes. And he said, well, that's interesting because my wife came home last night and told me this, and I said, there's no way that could be happening. But he was very happy for us when we got engaged and then got married. Our son happens to be named Joe, but he's not named after Joe Simitian. He is named after a Kessler relative.

So my first couple of years at AACI, I did not have a child yet and I worked all the time. I felt like it was my responsibility to go to every Asian event, meet all of the Asian leaders, work longer than everybody else, and really devote myself to the work. And I have no regrets about doing that. But once I had a child in 2007, I quickly realized that I was not going to be able to work those kinds of hours. I was not going to be able to go to every event and pick up my kid at daycare. And it was both humbling and liberating at the same time to realize like, Hey, no one really cares if I miss the 23rd annual Asian People event, I don't have to go to everything. I am actually a better employee and a better leader when I have greater work life balance, and that was a really important lesson for me to learn. Something that I have tried to sustain as I've continued my career.

So when the pandemic came around in 2020 and we were all suddenly working from home, I kind of loved it. Perhaps it was the introvert in me, but I realized, oh, I can be just as efficient, maybe more efficient using Zoom, which I had never used before in March 2020. And I don't need to be commuting 2 hours a day every day to have face time with people. The whole world opened up, and I think it's the silver lining of the pandemic that I realized, oh, I can have more work life flexibility and so can the people I work with and will be better because of it.

Timeframe 36:18 >> 39:00

Oh, so in the pandemic, I was at home reading a lot and I stumbled across a book recommended by a friend, which was a history of Latino activists in Santa Clara County in the recent decades. So maybe 1960s to the present and I fell in love with this book. I reached out to a woman I had met in my first year as AACI CEO. Alete Lundberg and I said, oh my gosh, I've just read this incredible book. Wouldn't it be awesome if we had something similar for the Asian American leaders in Santa Clara County? Alete said, Oh, that author is my friend. We should talk to her. And the ball just got rolling and we said, hey, we should maybe talk to a few more people and see could we do something like this book? But for Asian Americans in Santa Clara County? And we started to invite more and more people to our regular Zoom and some of the younger folks politely nudged us to thinking about different forms of media besides just a 300-page book, and to really look at multimedia strategies for reaching audiences. And then that led to us applying for funding from the county of Santa Clara County, which went to San Jose State, and the Oral History project was born.

Joy & Cultural Resistence Timeframe 39:00 >> 40:31

Hmm. So when I was growing up, both of my parents were always involved in community activities, even though they worked full time demanding jobs. So my mother was president of that horrible Chinese school that I attended, and my father was very active in the YMCA and father-child activities, and I wasn't conscious of it when I was growing up. But when I look back, I realize that my enthusiasm for volunteering and community activism started with watching them in their lives. So I have always tried to serve on a nonprofit board. I think it's a way of giving back to the community while also selfishly learning skills and knowledge that I didn't have before. And in the pandemic, again, we were all sitting around at home some Asian women friends and I decided to start an Asian women's group. Yes, I don't know what we were thinking. I think we were bored. But so, in let's see, in 2019 I had a lunch with three Asian American women friends, and we were talking about some of our frustrations with the Asian male patriarchy that we see alive and well in Santa Clara County. I shared the stories of my AACI experiences with them. They had stories of their own, and we said, we want a group where Asian American women have a safe space to support each other, to share our challenges, to build each other up. One of the things we talked about is this concept of Shine theory, which was embraced by women in the Obama administration and making sure we're shining light on other women. And so we created this group, which we launched in the pandemic, because there's no time like the pandemic to start something new. It's a group called Asian Women Empowered or AWE and we started doing quarterly events for Asian American women and others who want to come over Zoom. And as the pandemic evolved and we were able to start meeting in person, we started moving towards some more in-person events, some community service activities. But the foundation of AWE is really to support Asian American women in Silicon Valley slightly beyond. And we're really excited about the trajectory.

Timeframe 40:31 >> 42:25

(Interviewer) And so how are you balancing life now or you did your child is older now? I think.

Yes. My son is 15, 15.

(Interviewer) Okay. And so how do you balance life now, presently?

How do I balance life now? Not that well, but I am grateful. My son is a little bit older. He is quite self-sufficient on most days. And so I do have more time to balance work and family and community activities. I am slowly wrapping my head around, getting back into commuting on a regular basis, which I have mixed feelings about, but I really think I am better in all aspects of my life when I have a balance of different activities and different things that are challenging me and stimulating me. One of the biggest issues I think the Asian American community needs to address is one that AACI embraced from its very beginnings, and that's mental health. When I look at the stats about the youth mental health crisis today, in 2023, I am super worried for everybody, but especially for our Asian American community, because the stigma around mental illness and substance abuse still exists. We are not a great culture at talking about difficult subjects out loud, especially with the people we love the most. And I really want our Asian American community to get better at talking about these issues, looking for help, encouraging others to look for help, and making sure that culturally appropriate resources, whether that's counselors or programs, are easily accessible by people who need them.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 42:25 >> end

I define activism as showing up and showing up can look all kinds of different ways. Sometimes That means speaking at a press conference or using a megaphone to communicate your platform. Other times, it can mean being behind a computer and doing background research to make sure that you understand the issues and can empower others to use their voice. But I think we as a community, as an Asian American community, we need to find our voices and use them and use them often because otherwise we're too often seen as invisible or as foreigners, even today.

As someone who's spent most of my career in the nonprofit sector, I have seen how crucially important volunteers are, whether they're interns or roll up your sleeves, hands on volunteers doing direct service. The nonprofit sector really needs you and so if you just want to get out of your comfort zone, if you want to try something new, if you want a new learning experience, you want to make new friends or you're just bored, check out the nonprofit sector and see if there's a way for you to get involved. And sometimes you might approach a nonprofit and they don't have space for you at that time. But there are so many in the community doing incredible heroic work. I think just putting your toe in the door and getting experience, even if it's bad experience, it's still valuable, is a way for all of us to get more involved in making our community a better place.

As someone in my fifties, it's really troubling to see the rise in Asian hate, especially over the last several years, perhaps due to the Trump administration, perhaps due to the various theories about the pandemic and where COVID started and due to just institutional racism that's been alive and well for decades, if not centuries, in our country, I think we need to support our Asian American youth who are grappling with Asian hate for the first time. It's something we can address. I'm very excited about all of the efforts at the Santa Clara County level, as well as the state level, to address Asian hate. But we can't give up, and some of the work we need to do is to make sure we're building and cultivating relationships not only within our Asian American community for support, but with other communities of color. Many of our fellow communities of color have experienced hate just as we have, and we are so much stronger when we come together and stand up for our rights and our values and build relationships across, races.

There are two people that I wanted to give a shout out to who have really been mentors during my career. One is a fellow named Wes Fukuyama, who was the executive director of Yu Ai Kai, a nonprofit in Japantown and a lifelong long mental health advocate. He is now in his eighties. When I was going through my first executive director experience at AACI, let me start that again. When I was a first-time executive director at AACI and really struggling with the role and the stress of being a leader in the community, Wes was one of the most helpful people and wise counsel that I turn to, and we still regular hourly meet for lunch. Even though he's now retired, he is still a fierce mental health advocate and a mentor and a friend. He really helped me see things in perspective when I was so close to what was happening inside the organization. He was the one who was able to help me step back and reflect about the larger picture and where we wanted to take the movement. That was really helpful.

Another executive director who has been such a support system in my career is Roy Hirabayashi, the founder of San Jose, Taiko, and just a wonderful community activist to this day. And he has such a calm and grounding presence that every time I sit down with him, whether it's at Roy’s Station for coffee or at Gombei for lunch, and I'm like, oh, I'm doing goes through. And he just is able to call my nerves, help me see perspective. He always has valuable advice or a suggestion of someone I might want to talk to given his incredible network. And I have really admired his quiet leadership over the decades, not just for Taiko, but really for the Asian American community. And Roy continues to be one of my role models today.

Oh, one of the things I continue to try to do and I encourage others to do is to step out of your comfort zone. And it's not the natural place where most of us want to go, but it has led me to some incredible career journeys and accomplishments that I would never have dreamed of. One example I'll share is that in, I think 2008, I was at AACI and by virtue of being the CEO of AACI, I got invited to a lot of things as a Asian person or professional Asian as friends like to say. I struggled with that for some time, but I also recognized it was an opportunity not just for me but for the community. And so I was invited to serve on this dreadfully boring city of San Jose Budget Deficit Reduction Task Force. The name said it all. It was incredible, really dull and not very fun because the city was looking at a multimillion-dollar deficit and this group was coming together to talk about strategies to address that.

The group was chaired by a city councilman at the time who I really did not have anything in common with. We were not politically aligned. But I said, anyhow, I really this is not my comfort zone, but I'm going to go to this group and see what happens. And one of the topics that came up in this budget deficit task force was we could raise more revenue for the city if we increased the taxes on San Jose's two card rooms: Bay 101 and Garden City at the time. And I thought, huh, if you've walked into either of those card rooms, you know, the clientele is predominantly Asian American. And while many people can gamble responsibly, there is a reality of gambling addiction, and especially among some of the Asian American residents here in Santa Clara County. I was talking to the chair of this commission, and I said, hey, you know, if we're going to raise the tax on the card rooms, the card rooms should contribute to paying for problem gambling, treatment services, and it should be culturally competent problem gambling treatment services, given the clientele. To my pleasant surprise, he took that idea and ran with it and was able to negotiate in his role as city councilman with the card rooms to ensure that there was a stable, ongoing source of revenue to support problem gambling treatment for everybody but with a focus on Asian Americans. And that's one of the things I'm proud of in our legacy at AACI that we were able to accomplish for the community.