Workshop | Come Home and Eat Rice Together - an AAIPI Space for Storytelling and Healing

Come Home and Eat Rice Together is a whole group participatory and experiential session for those who have lived experience as Asian American and/or Indigenous Pacific Islander (AAIPI).

Based in the diversity of AAIPI cultural values and norms we will gather together to create space - through guided meditation, storytelling, arts practices, food, and other forms of healing - where we can be in community with other AAIPI public employees.

In the words of Mary Hooks, the work toward liberation follows three paths “...avenge the suffering of our ancestors, earn the respect of future generations, and be transformed in the service of the work”.

Your session guides are all deeply experienced AAIPI women, public employees, and trainers and facilitators. We have offered many similar sessions for Multnomah County AAIPI employees (and others), and are skilled in quickly and effectively inviting all participants to join with revolutionary love in the joyful work of liberation.

“If we want to see change in our lives, we have to change things ourselves.” - Auntie Grace Lee Boggs

Mary Li is the Director of the Multnomah Idea Lab (MIL) at the Multnomah County Department of County Human Services.

The MIL is charged with seeking policy and innovation approaches within the human services and government sectors. The MIL seeks to positively change community conditions resulting from poverty and racism by practicing equity and human-centered collaborative design, seeking out critical thinking and research, and conducting applied research tests in the real world.

Mary has worked for the County since 1990, and describes herself as a proud bureaucrat! She believes that it's an absolute responsibility for government to address the role that policies, practices, and investments have played in creating the inequities experienced by our communities today. By intentionally centering race in our work, we can take action that makes a difference in the journey towards justice.

As a member of the Multnomah Idea lab (MIL), Jooyoung Oh brings her expertise in design research and strategy to support systemic changes that center racial justice in government. 

Outside her work at the MIL, she teaches an equity centered collaborative design approach at the Collaborative Design program at PNCA and works as a Process Work therapist for the AAIPI community and supports healing history.  

Soumary Vongrassamy supports Multnomah County staff to develop skills that could help navigate interpersonal differences, institutional changes, and systems of power. She is the eldest daughter of refugee parents from Laos. Her latest sources of joy are bird watching and mentoring youth of color.