By: Shelby Andress
Search Institute Adjunct Senior Consultant and Facilitator
The annual Hmong National Conference is an opportunity for hundreds of Hmong professionals and students to engage in a collective discussion through business, politics, social service, and education. Search Institute Adjunct Senior Consultant and Facilitator, Shelby Andress, participated as a workshop presenter at this year’s 15th annual conference, which took place this past April in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She led a workshop titled, Developmental Assets: Building Blocks for Youth Competence and Community Connection. Most of the participants were college and graduate school students, using Search Institute resources in their studies on youth development, and the potential bridges between traditional Hmong culture and the new generation. Andress recently shared a retrospective look at her conference experience with us.
“I certainly cannot claim to be well informed about the Hmong experience in the U.S., nor in their deep and rich culture, nor in their years of tribulation as refugees. But I can tell you that I was both inspired and challenged when, on behalf of Search Institute, I participated as a workshop presenter in the 15th annual conference of the Hmong National Development that brought together one thousand Hmong elders, “boomers”, college students, and children from 12 states. I was their student, they were my teachers.
I heard leading voices issue a challenge; it went something like this. Thirty-five years ago we came to this country as refugees. We all know the hardships of those years. But we are no longer refugees. We are Hmong-Americans. Now we must come together and devote ourselves, together, to creating a vision of the next 35 years, when we become community leaders and advocates, not just for Hmong people, but for all struggling populations, in this land.
That challenge echoes the same challenge all Americans face at any of our youth development conferences.
My translation: Search Institute’s work began in the United States; now we must prepare ourselves and young people for thriving in a global society.
We have developed our own languages of youth development(assets, character development, resilience, protective factors, etc.). We have worked independently as youth-serving agencies—too often with competing initiatives. Now our culture cries out for a new kind of cooperation, a view of our streams of knowledge and passion as complementing one another. Perhaps we, too, need to create, together, a vision for youth for the next 35 years. As the Hmong leaders had the courage to say out loud, we too can challenge ourselves not to let the past patterns dictate our future, but to claim a new vision, a common language, to announce our vision and to guide us into the decades ahead.”
