I’m Kim Luong.
Toni Morrison’s words were a moment of awakening for me:
“When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
As the child of Vietnamese refugees, I hadn’t ever imagined work beyond a mechanism for survival. In middle school, I started teaching myself how to code. At university, I worked as a front-end developer while earning two degrees in Spanish and Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. My path focused on bilingual cultures, politics of identity, public policy, and demographic studies.
Since then, I’ve managed diversity, equity, and inclusion programs for organizations of 6,000 to 100,000 people. This work must be done in collective. I’ve partnered with DEI leaders to roll out racial equity workshops around the world, including in Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. I’ve analyzed people data to identify structural challenges, delivered diversity annual reports, and built professional development programs for womxn and people of color.
Reaching equitable outcomes requires systemic change and discomfort. I believe that this unlearning gets us closer to freedom and closer to our truest selves.