The SEAD Project

Growing Social Empowerment Ecosystems 

Through Cultural Organizing, Critical Language, 

and Just Storytelling

We're rooted in the fact that our work is for Southeast Asians, by Southeast Asians. 

SEAD invites you to help us reimagine, re-energize, and refocus. Together, we will envision a just world where we thrive as our truest selves. At SEAD, our passionate team works toward an overall sustainability and equity. We only succeed together, and as our world transitions to a new reality, we understand how vital community support and involvement is. We build toward a new future, just as our elders did when they arrived to America. Our histories show that we have persevered through uncertainty, lack of resources, and interruptions to daily life. SEAD continues to honor generational traditions through storytelling, educational programs, and creative community building. 

Your $ goes to:

• Support our design teams and translators to produce high quality content, visuals, and messages for crisis communication in Burmese, Hmong, Karen, Khmer, Viet and other critical Southeast Asian languages as needed.
• Host e-workshops, talks, and safe spaces for Southeast Asian communities.
• Develop culturally-nuanced and healing-centered resources that are necessary to the physical and mental well-being of Southeast Asian communities.
• Provide simple design, supplies, and coordination of pandemic necessities to vulnerable Southeast Asian and other BIPOC communities (specifically those who are immunocompromised and elderly).
• Grow the next generation of emerging creative leaders and futurists who'll nurture a better world for us.

Our Mission

The SEAD Project (Southeast Asian Diaspora) is a community organization on a mission to be an accessible creative hub that provides streamlined workshops and tools to engage and share knowledge in Khmer, Hmong, Lao and Viet diaspora communities. Through safe and welcoming spaces, we hope to grow empowerment to plant seeds of hope and possibility, locally and globally. 

Our Programs

• SEA Roots Heritage Workshops: Hmong, Khmer, Lao & Viet Language and Culture
• SEA Change Lab: Arts & Advocacy Reimagined for Creative Youth Entrepreneurs 
• Collective Storytelling: Planting SEADS
• Community Engagement: Healing-Informed Community Conversations
• Education and Abolition Work

Our Issues: Snapshot of Southeast Asians

Minnesota is home to one of the largest and most thriving Hmong, Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese communities, post-1975 resettlement era. Research consistently points to Southeast Asians holding the lowest educational and economic outcomes compared to other Asian American groups. This is where SEAD comes in. We believe in community development through what we already know and have: our cultural assets. We’re a diaspora movement facilitating that change through two access points: creative engagement and education. By co-creating with the communities we come from, live in, and thrive in-- we’re empowering the next generation to be transformative in how we view development through language learning and storytelling.

And here’s how we thank you...

We love our supporters. That's why we'll give you a shoutout and a thank you e-card in our languages. In addition, we encourage you to join any and all of our community events, both virtual and safely in person. All donations are tax-deductible. Our federal EIN: 47-4088420.

Take a peek inside some of our programming below: