A few years before losing her mother and grandmother, Jouapag Lee teamed with five other like-minded professionals to talk about healing from traumas — both recent and historical — in the Hmong refugee community. One member of the Hmong Healers Collective was a substance abuse counselor. Another was a spiritual energy healer. The year was 2019, and little did they expect that the pandemic — which had a disproportionate impact on Hmong families — would offer plenty of lessons about grief, loss and recovery against the backdrop of a national wave of anti-Asian hate.
Then, in 2022, her mother and grandmother died within months of each other, shortly before the birth of her second child, opening up for her an even more personal understanding. Lee now hopes to expand her trauma studies, in part by learning from Jewish communities in the Netherlands and an indigenous community in Australia, an effort made possible with financial support from the St. Paul-based Bush Foundation.
The foundation has selected 24 fellows from a pool of nearly 600 applicants to receive funding for two-year leadership awards. The fellows, including six from St. Paul and Ramsey and Washington counties, hail from Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and the 23 Native nations that share the same geography.
The 24 award winners will each receive up to $100,000 to fund their education and other grant-supported pursuits in their desired field. Fellows were selected through a review process that included interviews and mentoring sessions with community leaders, Bush Fellow alumni and Bush Foundation staff.
Counseling, healthcare and cultural growth
Several of the recipients have ties to counseling, healthcare and cultural growth.
“As folks are working one-on-one with individual clients, they start seeing the need for systemic and community collective change, and the Bush Fellowship is oftentimes for folks who work in the healthcare field to start working on the collective level,” Lee noted.
Archibald “Archie” Bush, a Duluth bookkeeper with the company that would grow to be known as 3M, founded the foundation in 1953 with his wife, Edyth Bush. The foundation was set up with few restrictions, with the goal that board members would have flexibility to address changing needs of the day over time.
“I’m still kind of in shock,” said Bush Fellow awardee Trahern Crews, the chair of the St. Paul Recovery Act Community Reparations Commission. “This is is surreal.”
Among the 24 award winners:
Mari Avaloz of St. Paul: After her sister — for whom she was primary caregiver — died of ovarian cancer in 2019, Avaloz wanted to make it her mission to help other Latin families navigate healthcare systems while dealing with barriers like language, documentation and familiarity with the industry. She plans to use her Bush Fellowship to enroll in an intensive Spanish immersion program, obtain a graduate social work license, learn from other healthcare leaders working in the cancer field and the Latin community, and complete courses related to her own leadership in healthcare. Avaloz has been employed by St. Olaf College for 23 years, including more than a decade as director of its TRIO/Upward Bound program, and holds a master’s degree in clinical social work from the University of St. Thomas.
Adrean Clark of St. Paul: As a deaf author and illustrator, Clark found few places where American Sign Language-speaking deaf artists could publish their works. She co-founded a publishing company to showcase the work of other sign language speakers and established an online dictionary for written ASL that eventually became known as the “ASLwrite” method. With her Bush Fellowship, she plans to pursue her doctorate at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec and expand her research on how ASL is represented on paper. She has published several books, and shares her comics and zines at adreanaline.com.
Trahern Crews of St. Paul: Crews, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, has been a vocal advocate for Black Minnesotans, an effort that gained greater attention after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis, at the hands of a Minneapolis Police officer. With Crews acting as co-chair, the St. Paul City Council established a legislative advisory committee on the subject of recovery and reparations for institutionalized and structural racism. Based on the work of the committee, the city council in 2023 then established the St. Paul Recovery Act Community Reparations Commission, which he chairs. Crews, who recently joined a national network of reparations commissioners, plans to use his award to connect Black Lives Matter Minnesota to similar efforts in other states, as well as enroll in college courses and training in public speaking through Toastmasters and other opportunities.
Jouapag Lee of Roseville: Inspired by her upbringing as the eldest of five children of Hmong refugee parents, Lee became a founding member of the Hmong Healers Collective to share practices for healing within her community. She hopes to create what she described as a “culturally grounded space for Hmong American millennials to learn the histories of oppression and trauma and explore what collective healing could look like in their community.” She will use her Bush Fellowship to obtain a trauma-informed coaching certificate through the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching and St. Catherine University, strengthen her written Hmong language skills, work with a coach to develop sustainable business practices, and travel with her father, husband and children to Laos and Thailand to further connect with her Hmong roots. She is program evaluator with the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies and former employee of LISC and the St. Paul Promise Neighborhood.
Kasim Abdur Razzaq of St. Paul: As both a mental health counselor and a Black Muslim male, Razzaq has long focused on topics seemingly taboo in the communities he travels. The importance of mental health is often disregarded in his circles, so he focuses on giving other Black males and Muslims the language to describe their personal experiences in a context rooted in culture. He plans to use his Bush Fellowship to focus on his own health practices and build capacity to support more Black mental health professionals.
May Lee Xiong of Cottage Grove: Xiong grew up in Minnesota feeling disconnected from her Hmong culture, but later gained inspiration from the stories she was exposed to about her immigrant parents and their journey to America. She went on to help co-create the Hmong Studies and Hmong Dual Language programs at Phalen Elementary School in St. Paul. With her Bush Fellowship, she said she will seek ways to deepen her understanding of language revitalization and “build her skills to advocate for transformative changes in public education.”