I am a daughter of refugees, a Southeast Asian woman, and a mom raising two girls in an increasingly hostile world. When overwhelmed, I tend to look for action—some physical thing I can do to take back some semblance of balance or calm.
In 2017, when Donald Trump took office as president, I felt unmoored and searched for a safe space. I came across a local activism group online called the Resistance (which later became an Indivisible chapter). The room was filled with about 200 strangers, yet the energy was singular and electric. I had arrived feeling lost, and left feeling uplifted with purpose. At the end of the meeting, I approached the speaker with questions about potential community outreach events, something that’s been an active part of my life from high school through post…
I am a daughter of refugees, a Southeast Asian woman, and a mom raising two girls in an increasingly hostile world. When overwhelmed, I tend to look for action—some physical thing I can do to take back some semblance of balance or calm.
In 2017, when Donald Trump took office as president, I felt unmoored and searched for a safe space. I came across a local activism group online called the Resistance (which later became an Indivisible chapter). The room was filled with about 200 strangers, yet the energy was singular and electric. I had arrived feeling lost, and left feeling uplifted with purpose. At the end of the meeting, I approached the speaker with questions about potential community outreach events, something that’s been an active part of my life from high school through post graduate school and beyond. She immediately and graciously pulled me into the fold and suddenly I became the Community Outreach lead.
Book donations in 2017. Photo credit: Lannie Duong
I partnered with existing organizations and organized monthly outreach events, including:
- Collecting items for refugee welcome kits for the International Rescue Committee (IRC). Sacramento resettled more refugees than any other US city that year; today, Sacramento still has the largest Afghan population in the US.
- Preparing and serving breakfast to the unhoused, many of whom were veterans, through Loaves and Fishes.
- Organizing a Day of Dinners event through Indivisible, bringing like-minded community members together with guided topic conversations, and humanizing each other with a shared meal.
- Collecting gently used children’s books and stuffed animals for refugee children at a welcome picnic with World Relief Sacramento.
Over the course of that year, I also branched out into other forms of activism—getting more politically involved with postcard writing, attending marches with my young family, and even text banking for the first time. I remember thinking how opportunities suddenly seemed to present themselves everywhere. What’s more likely is they were always there, I just hadn’t been looking.
I continued on my own to partner with organizations, and was involved with:
- Participating in the Good Neighbor Program with Opening Doors Inc to help support an Afghan family with adjusting to life in the US and practice English.
- Collecting school supplies and backpacks for local kids for Operation Backpack with Volunteers of America.
- Raising funds for urgent crises in Yemen, victims of the North Bay fire, and states impacted by Hurricane Harvey through Direct Relief.
- Collecting children’s books for local public teacher’s classrooms.
- Organizing a toy drive to fulfill wish lists during the holiday season for children at the Sacramento Children’s Home.
But it was never just me doing this work. It takes networking, partnering with existing organizations, and asking questions. It turns out many hands do in fact make for a light load, how about that!
Photo credit: Lannie Duong
One memory stands out as an example. It started with an ask. I worked with a migrant mother who needed a refrigerator to start her pupusa business to earn income for her children. Through a wide network, I was able to connect people, each with a different way to help. One had a refrigerator to donate. Another had a pickup truck to transport it. Others offered to help carry and install it. We ended up returning to this family’s home with the refrigerator we brought, humming happily in the kitchen. We were also able to bring diapers for the baby, gently-used clothes for her older kids, and helped enroll her teen into the local high school. Her preschooler drew us a picture of an apple tree.
In volunteering my time, I have no special skills or influence. I just looked for dots to connect. I did what any and all of us can do, which is to ask. I asked organizations like the IRC what help they needed for specific families. I asked folks in my personal network for help, and I connected those able to fill that specific need.
As I did more, friends of friends started sending me to other families needing help. I felt honored and humbled by this, but I hadn’t stopped to notice I was getting increasingly overwhelmed. Burnout was a lesson seasoned activist friends had warned me about, but I didn’t learn until I hit it. I pulled back completely for a long while to rest and reset, and take care of my physical and mental health.
The truth is, it’s easy to reach burnout. After the violent deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, I looked for some small way to act that wouldn’t overwhelm me. I had much to learn, though, and started reading books about the Black experience (at the behest of activists the world over: Step 1- educate yourself!). I formed a small antiracist book club with friends. In that safe haven, we got curious, asked questions we were scared to ask elsewhere, and discussed our readings from Black authors like Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-nehisi Coates, Mikki Kendall, Alicia Garza, and Carol Anderson. We read 12 books in the year, and hosted screenings of documentaries like 13th and James Baldwin’s I Am Not Your Negro. My introverted heart was very happy to show solidarity through one of my all-time favorite things to do: snuggle on the couch with a cozy blanket and a good book.
Finding exactly what I didn’t know I was looking for
I continued with these small acts until Donald Trump was re-elected in 2024. Again, I searched for community, and happened upon Shareable’s Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series. It turned out to be exactly what I didn’t know I was looking for. It was an accessible virtual workshop in the evenings that I could do while home with the kids.
Hearing Dean Spade speak for the first time resonated so deeply because it had been so long since I had felt seen. I immediately felt understood, anchored, and an instant sense of belonging. I ran to get his book Mutual Aid at the library and devoured it. Every successive online session was just as insightful, with speakers who were so engaging and a wealth of lived experience to share. Their vulnerability was contagious. There was an aura of true collaboration and collective decision-making, in stark contrast to the world outside of the workshops with its hierarchical structures.
But my favorite workshops were the last two: the open office hours, and the Offers and Needs Market for live networking. Both included group participation in real time, and that was such a gift. It was community building with real-world tangible tools, and that gave me a hope that felt true and sustainable.
Photo credit: Lannie Duong
New energy launches a new mutual aid group
After completing the workshop series, I was energized to bring mutual aid to my neighborhood. The workshop provided numerous online resources that were practical and user-friendly. It was kismet that a community member reached out to me soon after. She mentioned liking my “call to action” posts with specific actions one could take on a local online activist group. I was moving away from bigger, hierarchical activist organizations just as she was moving away from starting one. I shared briefly what I’d learned from the mutual aid workshop and it seemed like a good fit for what we were both looking for, so we started with a small group. I shared in an early meeting what I’d learned about mutual aid, and we started an Offers and Needs Market.
“It’s about community, collective decision-making, and taking care of each other, no matter how small the circle.”
We have met about every month since then to organize community outreach events and action items. Slowly, we are building a small community. Here are some the actions we’ve taken:
- Caravanning to protests for safety and solidarity
- Fruit gleaning at a member’s orchard and donating the bounty to the Sacramento Homeless Union
- Collecting sneakers for donation or proper recycling
- Organizing welcome backpacks for immigrant families with NorCal Resist (NCR)
- Participating in NCR’s Migra watch and accompaniment programs
- Postcard writing for special elections
- Fundraising for our local food bank
After 8 months, I’m starting to feel a bit of optimism in developing our mutual aid efforts while also accepting that our group does not need to be large or perpetually growing to be impactful or valuable. Mutual Aid 101 taught me that success is not marked by a group’s size, nor its productivity; those are the vestiges of capitalism. It’s about community, collective decision-making, and taking care of each other, no matter how small the circle. This gives every one of us not only agency but accountability for the changes we seek. Agency and accountability in turn build trust, a key ingredient to effective and sustainable mutual aid organizing. Keeping the group hyperlocal has been vital to keeping the pulse on our community.
Photo credit: Lannie Duong
Returning to my roots with mutual aid
While the concept is new to me, mutual aid also feels oddly familiar. As Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s, my family benefited from, and participated in, mutual aid. My mom was a teen when she arrived and distinctly remembers “shopping” through donated clothes at a local church. As someone forced to flee their home amidst a civil war, this gift was a grand gesture. She had arrived in this new country with only a suitcase the size of a shoebox.
In a culture that emphasizes duty and gratitude, it’s perhaps no surprise that I saw examples of giving back at an early age. I heard stories of my family, along with other Vietnamese refugees, practicing mutual aid by using a rotating loan system amongst themselves sharing money, resources, and job opportunities. Those that came before helped the next family and so on. The early Vietnamese community was small but tightly knit. This in part allowed them to survive in a foreign land while preserving their cultural traditions and maintaining their sense of self.
As a product of that community, I grew up with a mentality that helping others is not one person’s responsibility but all of ours. We take care of each other, and we keep us safe. What I’ve learned this past year is that the key ingredients for effective mutual aid are not rare or hard to find, but that they do take effort and tenacity, which is arguably a harder thing to do.
For me, becoming a mom gave rise to many new fears. Looking back, it’s interesting to find those fears were also opportunities to be courageous. I used to ask myself whether my choices would make my parents proud. Now I ask myself, would this make my daughters proud?
Now I know I can in fact do things while scared, and to check-in with my body frequently for rest. There will always be more work to put in, so I rest as long as I need, and then jump (or slowly wade) back in. Periodic rest is crucial. Being in a group, in true community, allows one to rest while others continue the work, much in the same way a choir of individuals can sustain a note indefinitely by staggering their breaths. It’s an impressive feat, and an achievable one.
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Being a daughter of refugees, Lannie Duong (she/her) has volunteered with the International Rescue Committee, Opening Doors Inc, World Relief, and NorCal Resist. With her PharmD, she worked with underserved populations for 12+ years, and volunteered with the Sacramento Medical Reserve Corp during the pandemic to vaccinate under-represented communities against COVID. She is also a co-founder of The Pharmacy Guild. Lannie is currently working on a hyperlocal mutual aid, and is often found holding a donation drive or kitchen-dancing with her kids.