so you read the questions before hand, so where were you born? years, actually lived in Malaysia and did my undergraduate... my first degree in Social

Transcription

1 TRANSCRIPT Multicultural Midwest Oral History Project Interviewee: Yoke-Sim Gunaratne Primary Interviewer: Christine Densmore Secondary Interviewer: Alyson Flemming When: April 23 rd, 2002 Where: Cultural Diversity Resources Office th Avenue South (Townsite Center), Suite 147 Moorhead, MN Christine: We wanted to start with some questions about, you know, your background a little bit, so you read the questions before hand, so where were you born? Yoke Sim Gunaratne: I was born in Malaysia, and then I moved to live in Australia for about 10 years, actually lived in Malaysia and did my undergraduate... my first degree in Social Sciences at Science University of Malaysia, that was in Penang.... it s a little island off the coast of Malaysia. I met my husband there and then we migrated to Australia, then I took my master s degree in sociology actually from the University of Queens land when I was in Australia, so I spent about 10 years there before I came here. And how did I come here? Because of my husband. He was offered a job at Moorhead State University. He s actually a professor in Mass Communication. He has completed his PhD at University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and had always wanted to come back to this area. So that s how, that s what brought him here. So that s, and he was offered a job, so that s how I came you know with him to Moorhead, so we came to Moorhead and we ve never left this area since then. And I came to

2 Gunaratne 2 United States about 1986 so that was about 16 years ago. That s quite a long time right? Anything else you want me to talk about myself? My parents? C: Yeah, what did your parents do in Malaysia? Y: My parents do? Oh, they were so humble. My mother was a full-time housewife. We came from a really large family.... We had about nine of us in the family. One died during the Japanese, you know, occupation and there were eight of us four boys, four girls. I m number 6 in the family and for girls I was number two, but I was number six in the family. My father is a marketer. Well, he sells vegetables like in a central market. That s what he does. It s a green grocer, we call it. That basically a little bit about myself. Right? C: Yep, so you were from Malaysia and then you went to Australia and you came to the United States? Y: Yes. C: How did this Cultural Diversity center start? Y: Started.... it started in 1994 and I think at that time there were refugee resettlement programs and Fargo has a very strong refugee resettlement program and so does Moorhead, Moorhead settles less. I think in 1993 there were several town meetings to identify community issues and there were three major issues. One was dysfunctional family issues because ten years ago juvenile delinquency, juvenile crime was a big issue, so there were a lot of concerns about family, dysfunctional family issues. The second one they identified was cultural diversity issues because there was an increase in the number of different people coming into the area because of the refugee resettlement program. So cultural diversity was a big phenomena. And then the third one was underemployment/unemployment.... It s always been there, so I think the leaders voted to focus on cultural diversity because they felt that there were no structure, no

3 Gunaratne 3 programs, no services in place, institutions in place, that has been focusing on diversity, so they applied to the Pew Foundation for a grant and they got it, and with the grant in 1994 they started what was known as the Cultural Diversity Project and that was in response to changes and increases in demographic. I was hired as the director in March of 1994, and that s how I came on board as their director. Now one of the successes of the story and maybe I ll come to it later is what do we or what does it do? We have several programs. We have community interpreters services program which provides interpreters for many of the clinics and hospitals in this area; schools and social services do use this too but to a lesser extent. Almost 85 if not 90% of the interpreters are in medical settings, and those are for people with limited English proficiency particularly for the refugees. Another program is Multiethnic Leadership Program. We take some of the ethnic leaders through leadership workshops usually in April, we re just going to finish one this month, and then we also will take them to some committee organizing workshops, and then we have mentors matched with them if they need it, and then we encourage them to volunteer, because we feel a big part of being a resident here is to participate actively in this community. You know the main goal of the Multiethnic Leadership is basically to create more leaders obviously multiethnic leaders, and also give them an opportunity to link with other resources in the community, whether they re leaders or community resources, because if you re new here you really don t know what is all here. You know if you re a newcomer from another state, now you don t even know where the child care is, you don t know whether you have people of the same ethnic groups there. Say, you re from Norway and you want to connect with a Norwegians, you don t know where to go and sometimes we help them with that through the Multiethnic Leadership Program.

4 Gunaratne 4 We have a self-sufficiency program; most people come through seeking jobs, helping with resumes, job interviews, upgrading the jobs, and then we have a person that deals with that, with good success stories, because we see people being placed in very good jobs right now, you know. Another one is the diversity training and community education. I do a program monthly for teachers that gives them a lot of tools, so that they can incorporate them into the teaching curriculum to make it more in inclusive. I also do a lot of training for the area, whether it s profit organizations or businesses, or government entities. We do that. We have a Cultural Diversity Awareness Week, and that is always during Columbus Week day, and the whole idea is to get all the different cultures together to do a variety show, whether it s a fashion show, variety show, sing-and-dance, culture exhibits, ethnic foods and also children s activities. We do it every year in the Hjemkomst Center, sometime in October around Columbus day. C: And these groups just Volunteer to do this and put it on? Y: Yes, yes, I mean most of them are from the public. We do pay a little bit for performers, but most of the time many of the participants or your know the people who attend are just from the community here. We have a quarterly newsletter, and in fact before you go I ll make sure you have some of those materials, you take with, and the quarterly newsletter has a cultural profile insert in there. The most recent one was on China. In the past, we ve done Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Somalia, Sudan, Bosnia. Just to educate people about this region and people really look forward to the cultural profiles because they learn something about what is happening in this area. What else do we do? We do a lot of other different things in collaboration with other agencies. For example, for a couple of years we worked closely with Clay County Public Health to do, to kind of get community outreach people to educate more about cancer prevention and

5 Gunaratne 5 they were all contracted interpreters or committee outreach people that actually go to the communities where there are Arabic speaking or Vietnamese or Spanish communities to make sure that they know about cancer preventions stuff. I think we re beginning to do more and more on the human rights education, because I sit on the Fargo Human Relations as a commissioner, now you re wondering, what s she doing here in Fargo. The reason is because Cultural Diversity Project and I ll tell a little bit of history because you ask some very good questions. [Cultural Diversity Resources] also services Fargo, West Fargo, Dilworth, Moorhead, Cass and Clay County, so even though physically I m here, I service the Fargo Moorhead metro area, so that s why I was approached by the mayor to apply for that position that they created the Fargo Human Relations, because I have a lot connections with the ethnic groups particularly the refugees and so now, what I find is that people do come forward with discrimination issues and they would tell, and we would explain to them the process of doing an intake form, where would you complain, and obviously if they were job related, then the self sufficiency coordinator takes care of that to make sure that we refer them to a lawyer or get some help where that is needed. So that s what it is. C: Is there a lot of incidents like that? Do a lot of people find discrimination in this area or.. Y: You will get, actually the Forum has a very good article recently, because they, we, the Fargo Human Relations just made their report to the city of Fargo commissioners in, I think it was, the beginning of this year. We made a report, and in the report, I can t remember how many complaints, but I would say 40% of the complaints were job related, many of them were job related. Some were racial. I would say the other third is racial, and some of the others such as public accommodations issues, housing issues, so you can get the report from the city of Fargo, if you wanted more information. Now I told you already, what CDR does. When I became [the

6 Gunaratne 6 Cultural Diversity Resources director] it was When I became the executive director it was when it started they hired me and I ve been there since then. C: So what kind of issues do you do day to day? Y: Day to day, that s very good. C: Very diverse, I bet. Y: Well, it, I think, as an executive director, part of my job depending on the month too, is to apply for grants, writing grants. Obviously I supervise the staff, and that s the other thing too. When I started, there was only myself, the coordinator for community services, and also the coordinator for the self-sufficiency it used to be housing and employment, then we changed to self-sufficiency, because that s what it is. People come here and you ask them about employment issues, housing issues, and before you know it, they tell all the family problems and history. And some of them are sad because there are some abuse issues and then if there are abuse issues we refer them to Migrant Health or Rape and Crisis Abuse to make sure that they get things settled. In one case it was so sad it was very suicidal and we caught it, so and you know when you tell people how you re doing they say, Oh no problem. Right? But when you dig in more then when they trust you they really tell you a lot of stuff, so I would say that now where was I now? C: You were talking about what you do day to day. Y: Oh, day to day. OK, that s good. So that s one of the [duties], so supervising staff, I had two staff, and then last year we added on interpreters. We were forced to compete, I d always contracted, but it was getting very competitive because there was a private agency that provided interpreters and they were charging more and, they were trying to lure away some of our contracted people, and I mean the bottom line is people need a job, and if they have a job offered

7 Gunaratne 7 they will stay. So we started to hire a full-time Bosnian interpreter, a part-time Somali and a part-time Arabic. We added on that, and then this year we added on a part-time community organizer, and I ll tell you a little bit more about it, and then also an administrative assistant. The person, Barbara Chromy, who used to do the self-sufficiency program also acts as an office manager (she has a lot of roles) small office you do everything, so she moved on to be, to focus just on self-sufficiency, and I had a trainee, administrative trainee right now here, the position will be filled to act like the office manager and things like that. So I really expanded my staff now, from probably from three to maybe about what seven or eight. So part of my daily job would be supervising, because you have to do the normal stuff to make sure the paper role is OK and you know, and the evaluations and all that goes with that. I do on top of that, when you looked at all the programs, who s doing what, you have a coordinator for committee interpreter services, you have a coordinator for self-sufficiency, but I talked about training and I talk about multiethnic. Who does it? I do it. So I ve been doing a lot with diversity training although I m delegating more and more to I think the person who s doing interpretive services will also assist in doing some of the training, because she s on her way to do her Ph. D in intercultural communication and she s very interested in that so you know some of that will do. All my staff are getting really smart. That s, it s good, because the self-sufficiency program [staff] is also going back to do her master s, so that s why she shifted from office to that and it s a credit to the organization and myself I think, because I think to allow the kind of growth and support and yet they want to stay with the organization is something we try to balance, so the other thing is I do training and I do the multiethnic. That s why I started hiring the multiethnic person because I think I need someone to assist me in some of the stuff. I do sit on a lot of committees and I think if I give you one of my quarterly newsletters, you might see some of that because you already

8 Gunaratne 8 know that I m on the Fargo Human Relations Commission. I m very active in Moorhead. The Moorhead schools, I sit on the instruction and curriculum committee. I also had sat on the Moorhead Community Education Advisory Council for many years. I just let it go recently. When the task force for the [school] bond issue came, I was on one of the task forces, because they wanted to decide what to do with the schools, the middle schools. What are they going to do? I was on one of the task forces, I m also on the Moorhead School Human Rights Committee. I m on the Cass/Clay County Health Care Without Borders, community health issues, so we meet on that one. Ummm, what else am I on? There s quite a few things that, you know, I am going to those meetings so that you get a sense of what is in the community. So I spent some of the time there. When I get phone calls many of the phone calls, I m tracking them now, is a lot of information that I give out. Like people say, I work with, I m a foster care parent or we have a foster care program, I really want some help about working with Somali kids, or Sudanese kids or Bosnian kids, what do I do? Where do I go? I may get a referral from the chamber, and somebody is coming to get a job here, and they want to know, they are obviously people of minority individuals, and they want to know what this area s about in terms of diversity. I m very involved in Moorhead State University..... I m on my second year now on the Moorhead State University Advisory Board... and then you know the diversity goal is very much in picture at Moorhead State University so there s a lot of information and activity going on there too. C: So you are involved in all this stuff, what do you think is your biggest triumph? I mean, you re involved in so much. Y: My biggest personal and professional triumph?

9 Gunaratne 9 C: Yes. Y: I think my biggest profession triumph is really seeing the continuation of Cultural Diversity Project. When we got the grant it was only for three years. By the end of three years I already know that it has to be a continuation and I incorporated the organization in We were, our funds were done, so basically when the three years is done we should disappear. But I was able to continue the organization and get it incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1998, and was able to continue the financial support. When we started there was a formula, there was about, they, Pew Foundation required that, I think it was 10% if not 20% of the funds has to be matched. It was a large grant; it was a 400,000 and it has to be matched locally, so we had about 500,000, almost half a million, dollars for a three year project, and with that money, the cities and the counties have continued to give us some financial support. That I think is a very... professional triumph for me, to take it from a temporary three year to incorporate a permanent nonprofit organization. We call ourself Cultural Diversity Resources. We changed the name from Project to Resources. We won several awards: one is the All American City Award in 2000, and also the City Livability Award, that was conferred by the Conference of Mayors nationwide in And also the third one is that we are on the President s Initiative on Race Relations web site. You know, President Clinton at that time had the race relations initiative in 1997, I think, and we re on one of the, we re on the web site as listed as one of the best promising practices. So those are professional triumphs. I think on a personal level I was nominated as YWCA Woman of the Year... in my profession, you know as a professional category, because there are many categories, and my category was the profession that I m in more, social, you know, social kind of issues in the year 2000, so that s what sits there so on a personal level it s always nice to have

10 Gunaratne 10 somebody kind of assure you, yes you did it, and this is what you have done for so many years and so I think that it was very rewarding for me personally. Is there anyone is the community that has particularly inspired me in my work? I think I get a lot more inspiration from the people I have helped, because if you see someone coming in, they have no jobs, they re very depressed and you know, and then you see that about a few years later down the line they ve got a good job, they re very confident and you see them change. You don t know it until, if you see them on a daily basis you don t see that but if you don t see them and they come and every time you meet with them you see some changes; it is very rewarding for me. Particularly for the multiethnic leadership because some of them have been with us, come through some of the programs off and on, whenever we hold workshops, they would come through. The workshops lead them through a variety of topics: time management, personality analysis, communication skills, kind of job interview skills, very very basic stuff, stress management those really make some significant changes particularly time management. We used to train the interpreters when they come. You know all those post-it notes you know how you have a book and you have an appointment and you post it here and you post it there. We start training people to take a calendar and if I tell you something, we actually physically tell them to do it, so that they know, because when you come from another country depending on where they come from they don t know those things or they don t have the means and we teach them those basic skills. You see a vast improvement in how to manage themselves and their time. And I think the other thing is to support them by saying you can do it. There s a lot of things you can do. Obviously the clients see success in the minority individuals if they get jobs, and I often quote that one of the persons that we have is the only Hispanic woman in the school board, Moorhead School Board. She went through our training and made a total change, and

11 Gunaratne 11 then she went on to serve as the chair of my board, and gave her a lot of practice and confidence, and of course this is news that now she s the first Hispanic on the Moorhead School Board [NOTE: Her name is Sonia Hohnadel]. We have a lot of other stories. I know people come here, I remember there was also a Native American who also became the director of the Good Medicine Indian Health. I want to take some credit in it because I know that I encouraged her to apply for the position. She came and said, Oh no, I don t have the confidence, and I said, Oh no, no, no, you have the confidence, I ll help you to share some of the things I do as a director, and she did apply; now she s going to leave soon actually in a couple of weeks, and do her master s program [NOTE: Her name is Doreen Holding Eagle]. You see everybody s going for higher study. She s going to do her master s program in Duluth University of Minnesota, Duluth, which is really great. So those are really rewarding kind of inspiration for me. C: So the people are your own inspiration? Y: Yes C: What kind of trouble do you find? What kind of obstacles Y: That I run into? C: Yeah Y: I think the first obstacle I did after three years was incorporation. There were many organizations out there trying to co-opt us. Do you know what co-opting is? C: No. Y: It means that you re on your own, they know you re available; you re good. They say you can become part of the program; you don t have to be on your own. In this particular area this is a really sensitive issue. Minority individuals need a voice; they don t want to have whites telling us what to do. That was basically the issue. Now it doesn t have to be me, but I feel very

12 Gunaratne 12 strongly as an organization. The composition of our board is very multicultural. You won t see any more multicultural than in the board here. We have half of the board members, who are representative of the different ethnic groups and the other half are Caucasian based on the technical experience they bring to the board, so it s a really good mix. I feel strongly when I got incorporated that we need to have a voice and the minority individuals need to have the power to make decisions for themselves. Because that s the way we talked about no role models, who s in charge, who makes the...who has the power to make those decisions. And I feel very strongly about it. That s why we got incorporated. We were at that time under the umbrella of United Way, and another organization called First Link, which is now providing volunteer center and also the hotline. That was when we were under the umbrella and we broke away, and basically said, we need to stand on our own, and do things on our own. It was very difficult, because I think there was a lot of challenges financially... but I was able to get incorporated, so I think one of the major obstacles is support. The fact that to break away and become nonprofit, independent nonprofit organization, was a very good success story there. I think once we got past that, it is really tough issues among some of the different groups that are doing diversity work, and I can see, give you some examples, like People Escaping Poverty [NOTE: People Escaping Poverty Project, or PEPP]. They work with low income, but they also working into a lot of leadership issues that we are dealing with too, and I have referred people to them at some stage because I couldn t do it by myself, and what we find is that some tough issues there sometimes, and also nonprofits have only a limited pool of funds to go to so we also compete for some of those limited sources, you know funds, so that s another obstacle that will be kind of challenging too.

13 Gunaratne 13 Now what are some of the efforts that CDR has made with the area community and business leaders? Definitely with the self-sufficiency program, we have created better jobs for people, and we have seen some of that already in this area. We are the only licensed, we are the only organization who are licensed to provide medical interpreting training. Not even Minneapolis, because we tried to get Minneapolis and we couldn t, so I wrote a grant and I got someone from Seattle, Washington to do it, so we have trainers here, and so we are licensed to do it, and that medical licensing really makes our [interpreting] profession much more professional. And that really creates an atmosphere that... there are better jobs. Because when I first started in 1997 trying to get community interpreter services going, and that s the other thing I m proud of, because everybody talks about it, but people, nobody wants to take the risk, and I stepped in, in 1993 and offered to hire a part-time interpretive services coordinator to get this going, and got that going... so well that people are competing. The program is in danger right now because we have a private translation services taking some of that business away. We also have locally Family Health Care Services trying to get into that field, so we re getting really stiff competition in that area.... we re trying to kind of review to see what are we doing that we need to kind of meet the needs of the community, so that will be a challenge for us. But the fact that we make it professional has increased the wages for people who work in that profession. It used to be you pay them six dollars. They used to be just relatives and sibling as interpreters and now we force people to say, no we have to hire them and they hire them. When they hire them they were paying six, eight dollars. Now it s gone up to almost ten dollars an hour, so I think that is very good. We have training, diversity training that I do a lot for the community, so that is good. We also have a lot of employment referrals that we do obviously. We do a lot with the business and

14 Gunaratne 14 community leaders.... the community leaders include the mayors and you know the others. I think the business leaders, we need to work harder on. We, I don t think, I think we need to spend more time with the business leaders, because I don t think we have enough of that with the business leaders. C: Do you get a lot of business leaders coming over here for cultural diversity Y: I think more training than anything else. We get, you know I don t even market the diversity training it s just from word of mouth. People know and then they come to us, so I have done training for what used to be Federal Beef. I ve done it for Wells Fargo Bank. I ve done it for a lot of government entities, like Clay County Social Services or Clay County employees in general. I have done it for the Fargo Senior Commission, Rape and Crisis Abuse Center. I ve done a lot of presentations for Moorhead State, some for Concordia, some for NDSU, so it s kind of a variety of different organizations too. Do you want to know about Cultural Diversity Week? C: You told us a little bit about it. Is there anything else you wanted to tell us about it? Y: Really it s just about, the whole idea is to get all the cultures together to celebrate. Variety show, you know the fashion show, and then food, cultural exhibits, children s activities, so it s like, it s non-threatening, it s enjoyable, that s how the different ethnic groups can come together, so that was the whole purpose. C: Is it usually a large turnout? Y: We have about 300 people and it happens always about Columbus Week Day and so this time it will be October 19 th, I think, in the Hjemkomst Center, it will be always in the Hjemkomst Center. END SIDE A

15 Gunaratne 15 Y: OK, now you have a question about, in what ways do you think the CDR has increased understanding and tolerance in the past? C: In the past years since it started. Y: In the past years yeah. You know the fact that we do a lot of training for businesses; it certainly has made an impact. We see a lot more people of color in positions and in committees and boards that we have seen, because the fact that there s more minorities out there, and people do call us and say, I need someone to sit on my board, or sit on my committees, and we tend to refer some of our people that we know. That really helped. We also have, we do a lot of information and clearing houses. I said before, we get calls and people will say, you know I have a client who is a Muslim and he works in my, you know, in my work and I don t know, what am I supposed to do if he wants to pray, you know, what should I do about that, or they ll say, as I mentioned about the foster care thing, you know, what do I do, or they ll say, we re disabled, we re a group providing services to disabled people, and I don t know how to contact the parents, would you arrange for some parents to meet with us. So those are things that we do. A lot of clearinghouse activities, a lot of information educating people, so I think that by doing that I think it helps to kind of increase the understanding and tolerance, and then you have Cultivate Our Cultures which is another. We also have, the fact that we the All American City Award really has highlighted some of the things we do, and also community leaders are coming forward when they know. We have very good support from mayors, particularly from mayors, so I think we have increased some of the understanding. We do sometimes do Cultural Competency Workshops; I did one last year at Moorhead State... where the different speakers and different cultures came. In the previous

16 Gunaratne 16 years I ve done it for all the nursing and the health professions.... It s called. Cultural Competency and Healthcare, kind of a workshop. I ve done it for two years, and was very... it was very well received. C: So the problems that you find for tolerance and stuff, it s people just not understanding the different cultures and the little aspect of different cultures? Y: Sometimes I think it s not understanding. Sometimes I think when you, it kind of varies. I mean if people were bigoted and racist and they don t want to think otherwise, you re not going to change them, but the majority of us, I think if you give them some information and expose them to a lot of other stuff. I mean we have a lot of prejudices and stereotypes about different groups, but when you go to a meeting and you hear different stories and different examples and different experiences, it kind of opens a little door there to say maybe I was wrong, or maybe I should think a little bit differently.... We have associations with the people that we have and if you re not a minority person you won t be actively seeking out to be a friend to an African- American, Native American, Hispanic, unless there s opportunities out there for you or you re truly interested and most of us go along with our daily lives doing things unless you break from that mold. And so when you have events like that and you re training like that, it kind of opens up a door for them to think differently and particularly in the work place; I think that is happening more in training. That really opens a door for you, so hopefully that will increase some of the understanding and tolerance. C: I also think your newsletter that you were talking about, where they ll... Y: Yes. C: That ll open doors...

17 Gunaratne 17 Y: That will open, yes, yes, the cultural profiles, the newsletters. That will be, that s also another opening there, and if they volunteer with us, they get an idea of who we are. You know, friendship and understanding comes from communication and relationship, and most of us tend to go to events just to enjoy the food and look at the show and then we go home, but we don t know the deeper part of it. We see culture like an iceberg: one third is visible, which is the food and the music and the art; the two thirds that are invisible are your values, your traditions, your customs, your beliefs, your lifestyles. Those are very important, but you don t get into unless you communicate and you talk about them or you read about them or you learn about them. That s where I think the increase in tolerance and understanding come from and hopefully it s not a bad experience. If you do have a friend and it turn out to be horrible, so don t use that as an example that all people from that group are terrible, because we have that. From time to time we have those experiences, to take the whole picture and hopefully it s more positive. C: Do you think these programs Y: Projects have been successful? C: Yeah, as successful as you hoped or your staff hoped? Y: Well, you know what, I think we have because the fact that we exceeded the three years was a big challenge, so I think that s a big success. We have growth in all our programs. The employment self-sufficiency, the housing and employment self-sufficiency employment program, we see a lot of successes. One example is this, we have a person who s disabled, and in some ways have some mental issue, and he came and we spent time really on a one to one basis, increase self esteem, help him with some computer skills, and he was able to get a job for the first time, and he kind of attributed the success: I would have never got this job with out help from us. I think that is very reassuring for us, so I would say that employment, the

18 Gunaratne 18 multiethnic is growing by leaps and bounds because of our community organizer that I ve added on, and I m hoping that I can do even more for some of those ethnic leaders. You know, the community interpreter services, the fact that we became a licensed organization to provide medical training is a big plus for us. I know that in this stage we are struggling because of the competition that we are going through, so we need to kind of review and see what is working and what is not working, and go on. I see a lot more expansion in our training. I m not the only trainer; I do have a group of volunteers, diversity trainers that volunteer for us, but I need to expand that pool and probably get more staff to be involved particularly one staff that I know, so that area will grow too. So all in all I think the programs and projects were successful. I think what I like to see more successful is really the funding part. Financial support is always an issue, and I did not, I did not want the organization to grow very fast, because my approach as a small organization, we need to make sure that our staff is well looked after, the programs are well developed with some stability, we have success stories to talk about, and then when you re ready then you can move to the next stage to kind of build it on and I think we re on the second stage no we re slowly growing. As you can see the staff is growing. We ll probably move out from this place to, not necessarily out of this building. If there was space, we ll probably move to a larger space. So those are things that is, you know, if you talk about successes. Success is not only measured in terms of numbers, I think it s very important to measure in terms of quality of experiences that we have given to some of our clients. Some of those are un-measurable because if people have increased their self-esteem, they still don t get the job, but they increase their self esteem, how would you measure that? Except that people feel good and maybe ten years down the line or five years down the line they ll come back and

19 Gunaratne 19 say, yes, this is what I ve done, you know. So it really takes a long time to build that kind, and I hope that some of the leaders will emerge.... C: Since you are a nonprofit organization, do you do fundraising or do you go business Y: Yes we do. C: What kind of fundraising do you do? Y: See this is an area that is very bad for us very poor, because you talk about my daily, that s part of my job, but as you can see I don t have the time, and fundraising need somebody who isspecialized, and I don t have the money to hire a full-time fund development person. If you look at big organization that s what they do, but we don t, so I have to do it myself, and I get the board to do it, so it hasn t been a very good we have not been very successful. To give you some example, since 1998 our fundraising is annual contribution, like you send letters and ask people to donate, we ve only got maybe two, three thousand dollars a year at the most. That s very bad, you know, compared to other organizations who brings in thousands. That, the problem is because we don t have a person focused to do it, so I m hoping that in the years to come we will, you know do some of the fundraising. I do grant writing and the grant writing is a successful part, and I do it most of my time grant writing rather than doing fundraising, writing letters, doing special events to raise money.... People s opinion positive or negative is kind of mixed. If you talk to cities and counties and community leaders, my impression is that they think of us pretty good. We seem to be a positive, we have a positive image, particularly with the universities, and school, and cities and counties, because we work very well. We do have a reputation of very good follow through with good staff. We re good people to work with, so I think that has been the positive part of it. Of course the clients is, you know, culturally sensitive, you know, people who walked through our

20 Gunaratne 20 doors and if you talk to the clients they ll say they are very nice people to work with, they re very understanding and very helpful, so that s the positive. The negative part? Because we do get governmental, government funds, sometimes people will accuse us, of course they get government funds, they re not bound to criticize, and they ll just go along with whatever the cities, and counties, and the schools want them to do, you know, to make them look good and they re not critical enough, so I think that can be a negative part of it. Although, I think we have tried to maintain a balance by making sure we collaborate with agencies like People Escaping Poverty or with social work department to make sure that, or Justice Circle, for example, to make sure that we support them and some of the things that they do because they re up in the front advocating for social justice and things like that. Some clients complain that they don t get direct services in a sense, they want financial help, and we are not an organization with money to give away, or scholarships to give away. We do help them, but it s more in terms of the, the helping with some of the, what is it, helping with some of the personal development things, rather than say, I want bus fare, I want some taxi money, I want some gas money. We don t do that, so direct services is not what we, and some clients like to see that. I think those are the reactions. You may know from talking to various people about the agencies. You have a question about David Duke. [NOTE: This is a reference to an article by white supremacist David Duke, We Go as Fargo?, that Christine and Alyson found while researching CDR. It first appeared in the David Duke Report, Issue #34, and is featured in an excerpted form on DavidDuke.com. It describes increasing diversity in Fargo/Moorhead in the 1990s as threatening and criticizes Cultural Diversity Resources. At the time of typing this transcript, it was available on Yes?

21 Gunaratne 21 C: Yeah, we kind of wanted to know just the flip side. We hear so many good things about it and he has such an extreme view. What Y: Well, what do you expect from KKK? C: Yeah, no kidding. Y: My reaction, you know in the job that I do, I try not to get scared, because if you do, you re intimidated. I know about him, oh even way way back when we first started in 1994, because his articles came up. That s a very old article, if you see on the web site. It s almost as old as 1994, I think; when we first started. What was my reaction? I think my immediate reaction, when I first got it, was not so much from him, but locally. Remember the Cheryl Tenderland case? You were not here probably. There was a case where there was a group of Hispanic kids and they shot a white woman dead in West Fargo. Then some time ago there was also a case of an Iranian couple that own a kebab house, an Iranian kebob house you know, and the woman claimed that she was tied up in the restroom, was set on fire and she had swastika marks on her abdomen. It turns out that she did it on to herself, but when it first appeared people thought it was racism and there was some racism around them, and they all do a rally against racism. It was just immediate like that, it was very very good turnout, but it turned out that she did it to herself and so there was a lot of bad publicity. Anytime when we get, you know, things like that, that happens in a community or the recent beatings of the Sudanese boys, things like that I m very happy that community leaders, like the law enforcement or the mayors will speak up against those things because it really sends a message to the whole community. So the community support is very very important, so it gives me some assurance. We have very good connections with the law enforcement both in Fargo and Moorhead, so I feel, you know in some ways we are kind of looked after, but when things happen like that, particularly the shooting of Cheryl Tenderland. I

22 Gunaratne 22 was really afraid because people, you know, sometimes people get out of hand, they don t rationalize and think that well; this is only one person, two persons who did it; it s not the whole [group], not everybody should be punished. So my immediate reaction for David Duke is one of the other stuff, what do you expect, that s the kind of job that you do. Although I have to say in all honesty, the longer I stay in this kind of profession, the more I m aware of precautions that I have to take, because as the organization matures obviously the more people who know us, when you start here nobody knows you, but the more longer you stay the more you re more visible and they know you more and then you become more a target. So those are things that, but you know, the image that we have is we re not radicals. We re here to do something to make the community work, and work together as a place where people want to come and work. We re not here to divide; that s never an intent, is to divide and say just because you are a person of color you should get more privileges than the white people; that s not our intent. Our intent is to say, if you are low income you are disadvantaged. We need to help you, because you need the extra help that you need, and some of our clients are not even persons of color; they tend to be Caucasians in our self-sufficiency program. In our multiethnic, we also open it up, although we limit the space, then we say, OK we need to give a choice to some of those people who are low income that tend to be more maybe from different ethnic backgrounds, but in general we open it up, so the idea was to really say, we wanted this to make sure this is a safe place, and we want to kind of get along and really, you know, make this an inclusive place to kind of live in. So it hasn t been a problem, because we re not seen to be an extreme fanatic group. So I don t know the question about do you think extremism or passivism is more at work in this area. I think there s a continuum. If you look at any, it depends on the topic it depends on the time. Remember when September 11 came up? Our area hasn t been that bad. I mean, it

23 Gunaratne 23 has been trying to kind of, you know, come up with workshops and forums to educate people about the Islam. It has, it is a continuum. At times they might be groups that really are out there to demonstrate, and even then I don t see them as extreme. Extremism is when you, when you take violence into your hands. Now the case of the beating of the Sudanese refugees was an extreme. In terms of passivism, if they didn t do anything about it they would have been very passive, but it wasn t; people came out. The fact that there was a Moorhead Civil Rights Report, and all of a sudden there was study circles, and there were several of those. Moorhead State is very instrumental; they had three last year to get the community to have a dialogue about what do we do about the Civil Rights Report on education, employment, housing, public safety issues. They were all out in the front. This year they repeated the same thing for three more sessions. In fact the last one ended about a week or two ago, right? You know that. So you have the justice circle, you have the social work department, students, and the department, who are actively engaged in social justice and equity issue, and we are just part of that helping whereever we can. Because I m on the planning committee too. I make sure people attend those and participate particularly from the minority perspective. We were of help in that area to make sure that we recruit people to attend and give them a, you know, different perspectives. So in that sense, I think, when you live in a community I think it s always a continuum. In some point of time there might be issues that people resort to doing something with violence, which I don t see so much in this community, or they might be passive, people who are being passive. There are times when, you know, people just go about their own way, because they don t have the time nor the energy, but you have a core group of very good community leaders here, and they come from many different aspects. It could be the mayors, it could be the commissioners, it could be our organization, ethnic organizations, it could be the schools, it could be the universities. That's

24 Gunaratne 24 where I think, and some business people too, that s where the strength is, and churches would be the other one. So I think there is more, I see more collaboration and dialogue, talking which is very healthy, you know, so it kind of brings it to the front that we need to do something. So I think that s a good sign. Alright. Now, did I miss anything? C: No. Alyson: Is there anything else that you wanted to tell us? Y: Anything that I want to tell you? Now how are you going to write up this one here? How, I mean, you write this one up and then it s going to be on the web site or what? A: Yep, And we, this will all be on the web site, and it will also go to, I believe the Clay County Historical Center. Y: OK. C: And we re going to give you a transcript before we do any of this so you can look over it and make changes; if you want to block something out or add something. Y: Sure, say something really bad. OK, so that will be good. Wonderful. Yeah, if I think of something that I ve missed, I ll let you know. C: OK. You ve given us a wealth of information. Y: Yes, it has been an interesting job, you know. Oh, there was a question you asked about when and why did you become the director. Well, you know, in I became director because I want to make a difference, and my job has been, when I first came here I was a community development officer at North Dakota State University.... I was there only for about 18 months or two years, then I took a job as the refugee resettlement, as a case manager for the refugee resettlement and Lutheran Social Services, and I moved up to refugee manager, and for four years there. When the grant came they have asked, they have encouraged local minority

25 Gunaratne 25 leaders to apply for the position and I was asked to apply, if I was interested in applying. I did because I felt very strongly that I could make a difference. You know, it s kind of funny because when I was at NDSU, I had envisioned many of the things celebrating cultural diversity on a tricollege and Fargo-Moorhead metro area.... We could combine it to do it together, and so something like Cultural Diversity Project that crosses through states and four cities was really really a dream come true for me to kind of make a difference, and having worked with refugees and knowing a lot of the connections certainly helped the job. However, the more, the older I become, and the more I m in this job, the less the people that I know are there, so the refugees new leaders are totally different now than what it was, so that s why I started hiring a community organizer, because I need somebody to be attending ethnic meetings, working closely with them, so that we know and we can do some of the things, because when you re out of it you don t know. I mean I m sitting here, what good is it if I m sitting here, you know. It s like hey where are you? I mean you re not even... directly involved in the communities, so that s why I have a community organizer now that works very closely with them. I still attend some of the meetings, and I know some of them, but the newer ones I don t and I think I need to get back directly with some of those things. There are future plans where we ll probably create some kind of a center. My dream is really to create a Diversity Center, have our own place where we can have offices for the different ethnic groups. It will be my dream to have that. It was talked about even in 1994, having a Diversity Center. People come and you have all the programs, you have all the different ethnic groups you could just go, so if you wanted Kurdish you could go right there and you find them. It s perfect and if the cities have any problems and they want people to talk to or do a focus grouping interview about some issues, they can just go there, and we know we ll be able to get them. That would be the ideal situation.

26 Gunaratne 26 A: That is your ideal, but do you see it happening some day? Y: Yes, it will take a while. It will take a while. I think many of the things that I plan has come through. You know, personally for me I knew I always like to be a program director and things like that, and it s come true for me. Sometimes it s the timing and the luck and sometimes it s, you know, experience and the fact that you worked your way up and things like that, so I think some of those things if you plan right, I hope the next step is really to get a Diversity Center. It would be really great to have, have that as a center. Then we can combine a lot of different things together.... I ve already started an endowment fund. The endowment fund; it s to ensure that you will spend the interest. I hope that we will be able to create enough interest to fund operating cost, because very often when you write grants they don t want to give you money for operating costs, and you have to find it some where else, and then you can only write to foundations for only so long, and after a while they say, OK we ve given you for ten years that s it, so where do you go? So it s always behind. It s a little bit scary when you work for a nonprofit and financial sustainability is always an issue. The government has been very supportive, but you don t know. Right now the Minnesota government... doesn t have money economic recession. The first thing they cut is things like this, so those are things that are difficult, and also hopefully the future is to make sure you have a good endowment fund and then you [have] a resource to kind of keep the operation going. And I think the other things also is that I feel very strongly is that staff who works with us should be well paid, and they should get good benefits, because that how you get your good people, you know, like businesses. People look at the money that they pay and they say, well I get a better job and better pay in a profit organization. Why would I want to work with a nonprofit? So I think we need to recruit and retain a good staff. Fortunately I think I ve been able to do it, and I m hoping that we can