Sissy Trinh
Interview with Sissy Trinh
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Sissy Trinh was born in Vietnam and moved to the US when she was 3, so she doesn’t recall much of her country of birth. But she knows a lot about the Southeast Asian community in her hometown, Los Angeles.
She applied for an Echoing Green Fellowship to deal with the "dropout factory" – the nickname for the Los Angeles Unified School district, the second largest district in the US with 750,000 students, which has a 45% graduation rate – yes, 55% of the students don’t finish school. The school district is under-funded and serves mostly a low-income population. Sissy Trinh knew that the Southeast Asian community in Los Angeles – Thais, Laotians, Vietnamese, Chinese and Cambodians – were struggling with poverty, gangs, and sweat shops, and she realized that they needed to develop a community center to give them resources to address the problems that the City and the school district could not.
She founded the multiethnic Southeast Asian Community Alliance (SECA) five years ago to create a center to work with the younger generation. It provides training, mentorship, and resources like help with college applications, SAT tests, jobs. It also trains young leaders to work for student-centered solutions to the District’s problems. She says that SECA is able to break down the complicated problems like poverty and the enormous bureaucracy of the School District into chunks the youth can handle. This enables the students to be proactive and work to correct the system.
Her challenge is that she runs a very small organization trying to deal with a huge institution. Getting the students to think about long-term change is also difficult. Her failures – which she sees as part of the learning process – are in losing momentum sometimes and in losing individual students who just give up.
Her advice to social entrepreneurs: “Ask a lot of questions before you begin.” She underestimated the amount of work she would have to do because she didn’t ask enough questions. “Know what you are getting into and then go for it!”
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