“I am passionate about preserving and honoring the human journey from around the world through art, music, literature, video, photography, and food.”
“My passion started earlier in life when I realized that communities of different cultural backgrounds came together to support my family as new arrivals – refugees from Pakse, Laos – into Boise, Idaho in 1981.”
“Their genuine compassion and selfless acts of kindness inspired my passion towards serving my community and my outlook on life. From this experience, it was a priority for me to bring communities together through embracing the gifts of different cultures.”
“ Throughout my life I have been gifted with incredible mentors, and my one true inspiration and hero is my dear mother. With her guidance and modeling behavior of giving back to the community, I participated in the act of showing gratitude and fostering life-long relationships.”
“ Her decision to take my older brother and I to flee our homeland so that we could be united with my father, who already resided in the U.S., was an experience that had a profound impact in inspiring me to pursue my doctorate in strategic teadership with a concentration in strategic foresight at Regent University, School of Business and Leadership in Virginia Beach, VA.”
“My family’s refugee journey and that of all diaspora groups (those who have been involuntarily displaced from their origin homelands) around the world inspired my vision to foster a community built on meaningful relationships by exploring innovative approaches in preserving stories of the human journey.”
“ The Idaho Museum of International Diaspora’s (IMID) architecture and design teams are in the process of rendering the master plan for our multipurpose innovative museum that will connect the community to the 123 cultures that make up Idaho through art, music, literature, video, photography, and foods.
“We anticipate the structural building of the world’s first international scale diaspora-specific museum in Boise downtown in 2023. The IMID will serve as a model platform to raise additional international-scale diaspora museums around the world.”
“Our business model will pioneer the way and other states and nations in the development of their own ‘museum of international diaspora’ based on their unique diaspora populations that have resettled in their location.”
“As a Professor of Multicultural Studies at Boise State University’s Honors College, I plan to continue to teach three courses that I designed as part of the IMID’s Global Diaspora Curriculum: Cross-Cultural Voices of Diaspora, Cross-Border Voices of Diaspora, and Cross-Culinary Voices of Diaspora. My goal is to expand and evolve these three course offerings to additional schools in the higher education sector within the state of Idaho, nationwide, and internationally.”
“ Enduring hardships, challenges, and failures is part of life, and to become all that we can be, we must experiment with and test out ideas. Get to failure fast, learn from your mistakes, and move on. Dwelling on those mistakes will only slow down your progress because life and competition alike moves ahead no matter where you are in the recovery phase of that failure, big or small. “
“ Failure becomes less of a tragic story. It transforms a misfortunate experience into transformational change founded on lessons-learned and a-ha moments that enable me to navigate through conundrums. “
