The SEAD Project Microgrant
Our project aims to develop free online resources that teach Hmong language and culture to the public. First, printable literacy and cultural decks – for example, flashcards of the Hmong alphabet, or an overview of a prevalent Hmong tradition – available for download on our website. Our second resource include an interactive web app that teaches introductory Hmong language. Users gain literacy skills of consonants, vowels, and grammar, and can also engage in lessons that teach topics such as common greetings, introductions, survival phrases, pronouns, and more.
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Kee Vang (St Paul, MN) Kee was a part of the Truth and Transformation conference/work with MHC, and is also serving on the immigrant cultural heritage panel. He is Hmong. |
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Ka Vang (St. Paul, MN) was a part of the Truth and Transformation conference/work with MHC. She is Hmong. |
Laura Benson
Minnesota Humanities Center
laura@mnhum.org
651-772-4244
$850,000 the first year and $850,000 the second year are for a competitive grants program to provide grants to preserve and promote the cultural heritage of Minnesota.
(1) Of this amount, $250,000 the first year is for a grant to one or more community organizations that provide arts and cultural heritage programming celebrating Hmong heritage.
Our project aims to develop free online resources that teach Hmong language and culture to the public.
Our first resource includes printable literacy and cultural decks that are available for download on our website. These decks would feature different aspects of the Hmong heritage, for example, flashcards of the Hmong alphabet, or an overview of a prevalent Hmong tradition.
Our second resource include a web app that teaches introductory Hmong language. The web app is an interactive platform for users to gain literacy skills of consonants, vowels, and grammar. Users can also engage in lessons that teach topics such as common greetings, introductions, survival phrases, pronouns, and more. Lessons are presented as interactive activities and games to help users to stay engaged in the curriculum and motivated to keep learning.
With these resources, we aim to make all aspects of the Hmong heritage more accessible to everyone, from people who grew up in a Hmong household to newcomers of the culture. We want to promote a better public understanding and appreciation of the Hmong culture and to empower Hmong-Americans with the necessary tools to connect with their culture.
For us, success means high engagement rates with our resources. More importantly, success means that our users feel more empowered by the language and cultural literacy learned from our resources, and that they feel more confident to engage in and seek out aspects of Hmong arts, culture, and heritage.
When the grant was received in November 2019, we started planning and developing our work on the Hmong culture program for Spring 2020. For a $5,000 microgrant, the overall funding helped jumpstart some of our planning to pay for cultural and language experts to develop, and we are still seeking funding to continue that work, as it requires more technical resources. As COVID and uprisings happened from February through May, we couldn’t host in-person workshops anymore and had to address and pivot our work a bit, but we were still able to complete a Hmong language alphabet decks, a Hmong new year resource deck, and a beta version of the web app, and are still developing content for this summer and fall resources as well as a virtual pop-up workshop.