Letter from the Chair:

Dearest Family and Friends,

Inspired by a handwritten manuscript of a children’s book that was carefully preserved in a temperature and relative humidity controlled cavern, I began a journey 12 or so years ago. That was to create a Hmong Museum so that I may in this lifetime be able to hold a real object of a history that my parents experienced as refugees of war. Little did I know that it would take so much skill, patience, maneuvering, late nights like tonight as I write this letter, and so much more to move inches to see it happen.

As I’ve told my closest friends and earliest supporters that their mere words would give me enough energy to go on for weeks and months. But alas energy isn’t enough to get us going. So with great efforts by the board of Hmong Museum, who have stuck it out for the last four years, we wrote grant after grant. Of course this was after we received nonprofit status, which was itself a hurdle and great accomplishment for us. Gratefully, we received our first grant ever through the Knight Arts Challenge for $20,000. WHAT AN ACHIEVEMENT! We are ecstatic. Then for the same project we received a grant from the Asian Pacific Endowment grant and the Minnesota State Arts Board’s Folk and Tradition grant. We’re riding a very happy wave here.

But we need another $12,000 to match the Knight Foundation’s challenge, plus few more thousand to rent an office.

And so this long email letter is to ask each of my friends, colleagues, family, and acquaintances to help me reach Hmong Museum’s fundraising goals. On November 12, 2015, today, Hmong Museum participates in Give to the Max through GiveMN. Give what you can today. Sign up to receive updates, share this with your friends. We are building something here and you’re going to be part of it.

Donate here http://bit.ly/hmgivemn2015.

Read a short article about Hmong Chronicles, our storytelling project, here. http://hmongmuseummn.org/2015/07/22/hmong-museum-hmong-chronicles/

Like our Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/hmongmuseum

Sign-up to receive emails https://docs.google.com/forms/d/10z3JfW32rBYSxHuQVrCKaeXGnL8ffHN–79ArUTZYQI/viewform

Ok, enough with the links. There’s so much I want to share and this one annual email doesn’t do it justice. I plan to give more frequent updates as we progress this year, especially this year. Do donate, if you can’t, I totally understand. Simply sharing helps too!

Thank you for sticking with me through this email letter and for supporting me all along.

Yours, Mai N. Vang