A few weeks ago Alliance Institute partnered with Vietnamese Initiatives in Economic Training (VIET) to put on a health fair. A primary focus of the fair was the introduction of four of our other partners that are bringing health services to New Orleans East; a community with the highest density of Vietnamese families in the State of Louisiana.
Our quandary? How to make sure that participants in the fair, visited all of the partners embedded amongst the many vendors. The solution: establish a raffle whereby participants had to get a hole-punch from each partner to enter.
Rather than try to guess at what might entice members of the Vietnamese community to get all the requisite hole-punches, we went right to VIET, with the question of what the prize(s) should be (note: this is a mark of good organizing. Never assume that you know what is best for the community, ask and find out).
The answer? According to VIET’s Executive Director, Cyndi Nguyen, Jasmine Rice. An answer that elicited the title of this piece, “Why Jasmine Rice?” You see, our organization is made up of a mix of Black and White folks, who would never in a million years have guessed that jasmine rice was worthy of a raffle prize. Cyndi, however, informed us that her family alone (nuclear family, mind you) goes through fifty 25lb bags of Jasmine Rice each year. That’s 1,250lbs of rice for one household, my friend. Or as we might say in the vernacular-“that’s a lotta rice!”
On the day of the fair, we had 20 bags of Jasmine Rice on hand, to raffle off throughout the day. I won’t go into the stress felt by staff working the raffle due to the intense interest in winning; or the stories of folks trying to get a bag just because they got all of their hole-punches. Suffice to say that over 70% of the people who signed in, qualified for the raffle. Seventy per cent!
Were this an election, we’d declare a mandate. And as the United States of America wrestles with the ongoing change in demographics away from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, towards darker peoples of more recently immigrated status, the Vietnamese community of New Orleans East illustrated for us, that afternoon, that if you want to be successful at organizing in non-white, middle-class communities, don’t assume you know – you betta ask somebody.