2022 Cohort, 2024-cohort-mentor, 2025-cohort-mentor
30
edits
Changes
no edit summary
My '''mission''' is to transform the way in which underrepresented populations are able to capitalize on economic opportunities within inequitable systems. For context, I began my life in an orphanage in Yalutorovsk, RUS (I stand w. Ukraine), and came to the United States as an Adoptee when I was a baby. This personal history has led me to combine business and social work within my current and future domains of expertise based on lived experience. As I grew up, I struggled to tell my story, and in working through this challenging process, I became a high energy communicator who has now made a profession out of telling and listening to stories.
To align with this mission, in 2020, I co-founded the Organization of Asian Leaders (out of the asian Asian hate that my community was experiencing at an unprecedented scale across the U.S.), which aims to develop diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that support the Asian community at Central Michigan. As we developed the organization, we learned that it wasn't stopping hate that we could control or influence. What we could influence was COMMUNITY, and in doing so, we could build strategic alliances with the other underrepresented communities within our campus's ecosystem while championing their causes in tandem with ours. This rapidly transformed the landscape of how students saw themselves and their organizations' ability to create self-representation while navigating the higher education environment. We fostered change through fundraising, carving out budgets for ourselves, speaking publicly/ protesting for our causes, and so much more.
My '''vision''' has always been to work myself out of organizations to make room for new leaders to emerge. I always say, praise in public, coach in confidence. If we can do these two things, we can bring the next generation of leaders to replace us while operating autonomously through our training and principles that we leave behind. Then these emerging change agents can become better than we ever were.