{"id":9638,"date":"2020-05-20T13:14:39","date_gmt":"2020-05-20T17:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/?p=9638"},"modified":"2020-05-20T17:01:01","modified_gmt":"2020-05-20T21:01:01","slug":"you-belong-here-chanda-womack-04-on-her-education-and-nonprofit-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/news\/you-belong-here-chanda-womack-04-on-her-education-and-nonprofit-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"You Belong Here: Chanda Womack \u201804 on Her Education and Nonprofit Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"

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: \u201cI didn\u2019t choose URI,” she says. “URI chose me. As a first-generation, low-income student, URI gave me the best financial opportunities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Once at URI, Womack decided to study communications. \u201cWithin 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 <\/span>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\u2019t deny that something wasn\u2019t sitting right. \u201cI knew that that wasn\u2019t where my heart was, and I wanted to go back to the nonprofit sector,\u201d 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<\/span>, she decided to pursue URI\u2019s 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. \u201cI looked into the MPA program because I wanted to learn how various institutions work and how they intersect with every sector,\u201d Womack explains. \u201cThe knowledge I gained was extremely transferable. Just because you have an MPA doesn\u2019t mean you have to go into public administration. You just have a deeper understanding of how these institutions work.\u201d Womack took advantage of the MPA program\u2019s unique partnership with Rhode Island College\u2019s graduate certificate in nonprofit leadership, which allowed her to get her certificate while gaining credits that went towards her MPA. \u201cIt was done very intentionally,\u201d she says. \u201cI needed to know how to navigate public institutions.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As anyone pursuing graduate studies of any kind knows, it can be difficult to keep the fighting spirit alive, but the fire of Womack\u2019s own personal journey kept her going. \u201cIt was my experiences living, breathing, and navigating public schools that really inspired me to continue,\u201d Womack says. \u201cI grew up seeing a system that didn\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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.\u201d Upon graduating from the MPA program, Womack sought a different approach to changing the student environment by straying from traditional means of direct service. \u201cDoing this kind of work is important for direct services, but it\u2019s more important to challenge institutions for change,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

It was then that Womack founded her nonprofit organization, the Alliance of Rhode Island Southeast Asians for Education<\/a>, or ARISE for short. \u201cARISE was founded to elevate Southeast Asian communities in Rhode Island,\u201d Womack says. \u201cOftentimes, 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\u2019t 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\u2019t ready to receive them. Our struggle is similar to Black people or those in the Latinx community, but we\u2019re never a part of the narrative. When you aggregate the data, Southeast Asian graduation rates are similar to that of Black and Latinx people.\u201d 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: \u201cBecause our work is rooted in liberation and love, you\u2019ll see that not all our [ARISE] students are Southeast Asian. We have thirteen Youth Leaders in our cohort and about half aren\u2019t Southeast Asian. We value our multiracial and intergenerational work.\u201d
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\n<\/span>Womack now speaks at conferences all over the country, and she\u2019s been featured in <\/span>Providence Who to Watch 2020<\/span><\/i><\/a>. 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: \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019re raising social consciousness and figuring out how we can force them to face this problem.\u201d With all that she\u2019s been through and all she continues to fight for, it\u2019s 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, \u201cWhat would\u2019ve been good to hear from all my white advisors was \u2018you 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.\u2019 It\u2019s so normalized to think about education as an equalizer, but that\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

~Written by Chase Hoffman, Writing & Rhetoric and Anthropology Double Major, URI Class of 2020<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chandra Womack ’04 was one of\u00a01.2 million Southeast Asian refugees who fled Vietnam after the Vietnam War. After earning a B.A. in Communications Studies and later a Masters of Public Administration from URI, she founded\u00a0the Alliance of Rhode Island Southeast Asians for Education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1089,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[37,329],"class_list":["post-9638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-communication-studies","tag-masters-of-public-administration"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1089"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9638"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9674,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9638\/revisions\/9674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}