Chanda Womack ’04 was born in a refugee camp in Cambodia, even at infancy feeling the impact of the Cambodian Genocide and the Vietnam War. At just eight months old, Womack and her parents joined over 1.2 million Southeast Asian refugees fleeing the region after the Vietnam War in what came to be the largest resettlement efforts in U.S. history. Her family first settled in Philadelphia before eventually moving to Providence, RI. Later, when it came time to choose a college to attend, Womack saw where opportunity guided her: “I didn’t choose URI,” she says. “URI chose me. As a first-generation, low-income student, URI gave me the best financial opportunities.”

Once at URI, Womack decided to study communications. “Within the communications major,” she says, “you gain a lot of transferable knowledge and skills that you can bring to a lot of different areas.” She graduated 2004 with a B.A. in Communication Studies and a minor in Psychology, then spent the next five years working in the corporate world as a loan officer for a home loan investment bank while earning close to a six-figure salary. Yet, with the fabled American Dream seemingly in her clutches, she couldn’t deny that something wasn’t sitting right. “I knew that that wasn’t where my heart was, and I wanted to go back to the nonprofit sector,” she says, recalling her early days at Breakthrough Collaborative Providence, a nonprofit after-school program designed to support inner-city students in pursuing careers in education. When she left the corporate world for the nonprofit sector, she decided to pursue URI’s esteemed Masters of Public Administration (MPA) program. Based out of the Providence campus, this two-year program prepares students to work in policy or the nonprofit sector. “I looked into the MPA program because I wanted to learn how various institutions work and how they intersect with every sector,” Womack explains. “The knowledge I gained was extremely transferable. Just because you have an MPA doesn’t mean you have to go into public administration. You just have a deeper understanding of how these institutions work.” Womack took advantage of the MPA program’s unique partnership with Rhode Island College’s graduate certificate in nonprofit leadership, which allowed her to get her certificate while gaining credits that went towards her MPA. “It was done very intentionally,” she says. “I needed to know how to navigate public institutions.”

As anyone pursuing graduate studies of any kind knows, it can be difficult to keep the fighting spirit alive, but the fire of Womack’s own personal journey kept her going. “It was my experiences living, breathing, and navigating public schools that really inspired me to continue,” Womack says. “I grew up seeing a system that didn’t support me as a Person of Color and a refugee, and I saw how, 25 years later, these issues not only still occur, but they’ve gotten worse. Young people are still experiencing what I did, this lack of social-emotional learning and holistic support. 97% of [American] teachers are white, and this causes a lot of problems.” Upon graduating from the MPA program, Womack sought a different approach to changing the student environment by straying from traditional means of direct service. “Doing this kind of work is important for direct services, but it’s more important to challenge institutions for change,” she says. “It’s one thing to equip young people with the knowledge required to navigate the college application process, but transformational work occurs when we can organize movements to change these institutions at large.” 

It was then that Womack founded her nonprofit organization, the Alliance of Rhode Island Southeast Asians for Education, or ARISE for short. “ARISE was founded to elevate Southeast Asian communities in Rhode Island,” Womack says. “Oftentimes, Southeast Asians are lumped in with other Asians, so for me working with my community is a matter of political identity. Our forced migration after the Vietnam War isn’t common knowledge, and these folks came from war and genocide. They came to this country and were forced to assimilate into a nation that wasn’t ready to receive them. Our struggle is similar to Black people or those in the Latinx community, but we’re never a part of the narrative. When you aggregate the data, Southeast Asian graduation rates are similar to that of Black and Latinx people.” After tremendous advocacy and organizing, ARISE led the effort to make Rhode Island the third state to pass legislation that required the Rhode Island Department of Education to disaggregate Southeast Asian educational attainment data. Their work made national headlines, shining a spotlight on a community often ignored in the mainstream. While Womack has made clear the focus demographic, she stresses the importance of unity, stating: “Because our work is rooted in liberation and love, you’ll see that not all our [ARISE] students are Southeast Asian. We have thirteen Youth Leaders in our cohort and about half aren’t Southeast Asian. We value our multiracial and intergenerational work.”

Womack now speaks at conferences all over the country, and she’s been featured in Providence Who to Watch 2020. One of ARISE’s current works alongside other youth serving organizations is fighting for the implementation of an adequate civics education program and curriculum in all Rhode Island public schools, explaining that: “It’s not a constitutional right to provide an adequate civics education, but, without it, young people are not equipped to participate in the democratic process which is a violation of their civil rights.” This is a big deal, if we get to the Supreme Court, then we would be fighting for a constitutional right to an adequate education for every student in the country. We’re raising social consciousness and figuring out how we can force them to face this problem.” With all that she’s been through and all she continues to fight for, it’s no surprise that Womack has lots of advice for other marginalized first-generation college students like herself up her sleeve. Looking back at her early college years, she says, “What would’ve been good to hear from all my white advisors was ‘you belong here. You have a right to be at this institution, and we are going to help you navigate it and all that it offers you.’ It’s so normalized to think about education as an equalizer, but that’s not true at all. Getting an adequate and equitable education is only the battle. The war is what you do with that education to eradicate oppressive systems and create systems that serve everyone.”

~Written by Chase Hoffman, Writing & Rhetoric and Anthropology Double Major, URI Class of 2020