I was born in Portland, Oregon, but we moved here to Central Wisconsin when I was about six months old, and I have been in the Stevens Point area ever since. When I was younger, I asked my grandpa why we settled here. He said, ‘The housing was cheap.’ So, I've been here for almost forty years now simply because of the cost of housing.
Ann Vang | Stevens Point, WI
I grew up in a refugee family. I spoke very limited English with my parents, and we lived in low-income housing. The women in my family tended to be quite submissive, which is typical in Hmong culture. For them, it was always cater, cater, cater. It wasn’t a bad thing for them, but that wasn’t what I wanted for myself. Although my parents were very traditional, they were also open to their children engaging in new things, such as going out with friends and going to school dances. So I also grew up surrounded by American values.
As I grew older, we eventually moved to different housing, but we were still on Section 8 or other housing programming. I attended school in the Stevens Point Area School District, then ended up getting my Associate’s degree from a local college as well. So really, my entire life has been lived within this community, and I have a first-hand experience of how important community resources are for helping people.
After my Associate’s, I went back to school for Financial Services, and then Supervisor Management, and started working as an advocate with Family Crisis Center at Cap Services. I really like advocacy work and I learned a lot. I remember one time, this woman came in wanting to report her husband for assault. We talked it through, and she said, ‘I never knew that marital rape existed. I always just assumed that I had to sleep with my husband because he was my husband.’ The interesting thing was that she and I were around the same age, but the look on my face was just shocked. That’s really when I realized how much our families affect who we are. For me, I was like, ‘I can’t believe you grew up with that mentality.’
She made a big impact on how I saw things. It was the first time I thought about looking at things through a different lens. I realized that unless you sit down and have a heart-to-heart conversation with somebody, they won’t trust you. Once they trust you, they open up and will tell you the world. That was the foundation of my learning to care for other people on their own terms. It makes me think of that Maya Angelou quote: ‘We didn’t do better because we didn’t know better.’ That’s what I always tell folks: what you’re doing now is okay, but as soon as you know better, you start to change.
Before I left my job at the Family Crises Center, I actually ran for school board so I could go in there and make an impact. This was during Covid, so a lot of my focus was on health and safety for my children.
While working with high school kids, I grew to admire today’s youth and young adults. A lot of them have much better emotional intelligence than a lot of older people I know. Young folks truly are smart. I think it’s very important to ask them to build the table and sit at the table with you, so they can start learning how to lead.
At the height of Covid, I volunteered for the meal program at Central Rivers Farmshed. There was a meal program for Hmong elders and disabled individuals in Portage County, it was a response to Covid and similar to Meals on Wheels. These culturally relevant meals were the first of its kind, catering to Hmong community members who have been here for more than 30 years.
When we were in quarantine and isolated from our families, a lot of folks weren’t getting meals, so we delivered to them. At first, it was a lot of cooking and deliveries and things like that, but I was still volunteering. So when a paid position became open, I applied for it and I got it.
My first year working there, I realized that we could do this for school lunches, too. I know the impact of having a healthy meal, especially with food like rice that will make you feel fuller longer. It makes a huge difference in mental health and performance. Cooking and providing Hmong meals for high school students using locally grown ingredients from area farms became an important part of my life.
Sib Pab means helping hands in Hmong. A couple of years ago I started working with the Central Valley Farmshed’s Sib Pab program. We want to make sure everyone in our community can choose healthy and delicious food and we work with, local Hmong restaurants and farmers to cook culturally appropriate food to help close the gap in food access for our Hmong elders.
Ann describes delivering meals to the Meals on Wheels Program for Hmong elders.
Then we introduced the home lunch program, which caters to high-school students. I cook the meals with volunteers during the school day at our commercial kitchen. Then it gets picked up by staff from the school. We cap the number of lunches at fifty.
Originally, we started the program to focus on Hmong students, so we only cooked traditional Hmong foods. Some fo the dished I have cooked are chicken congee, beef larb (meat salad), steam rolls adn the favorite dish was boiled pork and beans. But I must never forget the rice and pepper sauce. And these kids are so funny. If it is not a traditional meal, I will hear about it. If their rice is not cooked correctly, I will hear about it.
Sometimes I joke with them and say, ‘I am going to make you all some spaghetti.’
And they’re like, ‘No, we don’t want spaghetti.’
The fun thing is that we get all kinds of students, not just Hmong students. We have white students, black students, refugees, and whoever wants to eat our lunch. Anyone can have one, though it’s first come first served. It has exposed a lot of different people to Hmong cuisine, which is really cool.
In life, I always think that everything surrounds food, or else food surrounds everything. It’s hard to get groups together unless you say, “Hey, I’ve got free food for you.” When I was working for the Family Crisis Center, we held support groups after school. Even though food wasn’t part of our budget, we found a separate grant that didn’t have any restrictions because we knew the high school and junior high kids were going to be super hungry. The school day is long and they would come right from school to group, so they would always be more receptive to coming if there was food, even if it was just snacks.
I was at a teen summit and was talking about food. It was really hard to have a conversation because they’re all teenagers, they’re all too cool to have these types of conversations. We had some Black kids, some Latinx kids, indigenous and Hmong kids in the group. I looked over at the indigenous kids and I said, ‘Hey, so tell me about when you go hunting, you give thanks to the land protector. I’m not sure what you call it, but you give thanks and you don’t waste anything.’ They’re like, ‘Yeah’ and started telling stories. Then the Hmong kids are like, ‘We kind of do something like that, too.’ And so, even though we weren’t having conversations specifically about food, the kids were asking questions, ‘How do you gather food? How do you do this? Are we similar? What are things that we have in common? What are things that we don’t have in common?’
With the lunch program, the students are bussed over to Farmshed twice a year so we can all sit and chitchat. Sometimes I’ll try to ask them, ‘When was the last time you had this dish?’ or ‘What’s your earliest memory of this dish?’ or ‘Have you ever asked your mom and your dad why they have so many freezers full of food?’ I tell them it’s a response to trauma. When they were running through the woods or the forest, fleeing from the war, they were always hungry. And so, as a sign of love, they want to make sure that there is always food in the house.
Then I intentionally ask the students, ‘What is a home? What is an actual home meal?’ Our families moved so much from China to Vietnam, to Laos, to Thailand, and all of Southeast Asia. So I ask, ‘Okay, can you identify an authentic meal?’ The dishes we eat might be Laotian or Vietnamese, but we adapt it to our tastes and needs. I always ask the students about khao poon, or a chicken curry noodle. I believe these originated as Laotian, but every Southeast Asian country has tweaked it a little bit to fit their needs. To fit their flavoring. But it’s also important to remember the origin, the original place where it came from, and what is the story behind it. I try and instill that it’s important to know where your food came from because that’s our history.
You can hear Ann talk about what makes a home meal.
We rely heavily on volunteers to come in and help us because we are such a small organization. We currently have two full-time staff at Central Rivers Farmshed and then me at part-time. For the volunteers, it’s more than just work. There’s a storytelling and story-sharing aspect to it as well. One of the rules I have is that the kitchen is a safe space. If you want to share you can, and we don't ever repeat any of the stuff that is said there. It is a space where we can be our authentic and true selves.
I think that mentality stems from the fact that for Hmong women, the kitchen is a safe space. Because it’s a pretty patriarchal culture, you don’t see a lot of Hmong men in there. So, growing up, I always liked staying where the food was being cooked because that’s where I would hear the most stories and feel that safety.
The meal programs we run are just a small part of what we do at Farmshed. This past summer, we participated in the Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program through Marbleseed, a farmer led organization, The Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, and The Food Hub Cooperative. And we also work with local farmers to provide free produce to many families in the Portage County area, and send food out to the Wautoma Food Pantry.
We also participated with the Hunger Task Force Badger Box, which is funded by the state and sends out local produce once a month. From there, we started what is called the Farm Fresh and Free Produce Program, FFF, where people can come and get the local produce for free that we had leftover from the boxes. So that’s kind of how our food pantry started. For this program, we are the end-user, meaning the farmers drop off their excess produce to us. Additionally, we really wanted to take this program further, so we asked the farmers, ‘Hey, can you grow some culturally specific and relevant produce?’
Here in Portage County, we have Sudanese refugees, Afghan refugees, and I believe some from the Congo. So we’re trying to work with those communities to make sure that we’re also bringing in culturally-relevant produce, as long as it can be grown in Wisconsin. One produce that the Hmong community really enjoyed was the mustard greens, they were able to eat it fresh and pickle some for later use. We’ve been trying to source things like collard greens, lotus root, and some tropical crops we will try to grow in our greenhouse.
Overall, we provided over $120,000 worth of free produce in our area. I like to toot our horn about that.
We use REAP guidelines, however; we go by the honor system because food is a right. Healthy, fresh, good-looking food is a right. Just because you can’t afford food doesn’t mean that you should be stuck with leftovers or foods that nobody else wants. We set our pantry up so that it is basically a grocery store. You come in, bring your bags or baskets and take what you and want. We also encourage people to take more than they need so they can take it home and process it. They could freeze it for later, or pickle it, or do whatever they want.
It is really interesting to see the different community members coming in to get these items. A lot of times, white community members will ask, ‘What is this? What am I supposed to do with this?’ And then the Hmong folks will tell them, ‘You can actually stir-fry it, or you can put it in soup. And if you have too much, you can freeze it like this.’
About a year ago, I started working full-time for Groundswell Conservancy. We are putting together some workshops that will help make farming and the industry around it more accessible for Hmong farmers. These workshops are on topics such as land accessibility, record keeping, program access, wholesale readiness, market access, and agriculture careers.
These workshops are going to be targeted to Hmong farmers. Farming and gardening is a huge part of Hmong culture, and Hmong farmers are actually the number one vegetable grower in the state of Wisconsin. However, they don’t really have accessible programming through USDA. It’s not necessarily the USDA’s fault, but there just isn’t programming that provides support to them, such as how do you do record keeping? What does the accounting system look like? What loans does the Farmers Service Agency offer? So my job through Groundswell Conservancy is to focus more on farmer support.
Ultimately, in my mind, it’s more than just farming. It’s more than agriculture. It’s really about food justice. How do we make sure that Hmong farmers, or other marginalized farmers, are getting the same opportunities as our white farmers?
I think of good food as an important part of good health. And I see health more as mental health and not necessarily only physical health. Ultimately, it comes down to caring about where other people come from and taking care of them in a way that they need to be taken care of, rather than just as a general person or statistic.
Ann’s story was produced by Ann Delcourt. Her story is part of our “Civic Health Heroes” series produced in collaboration with Urban Rural Action and the Civic Health of Wisconsin Initiative, with support from the Schlecht Family Foundation.
Urban Rural Action brings together Americans across divides to tackle our nation’s most urgent challenges.
The Civic Health of Wisconsin initiative is dedicated to strengthening current civic health efforts around Wisconsin, to spur innovation and foster more connected and engaged communities.
