Beyond What We See: Learning What Community Work Takes

“Fatemeh and Reza, what does community work mean to you?”

This question came up during one of our weekly meetings with the leadership team at The Southeast Asian Diaspora Project (SEAD), where we spent summer 2026 as interns through the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub’s Grounded Knowledge program. At first, it sounded relatively simple. But as the summer progressed, we realized that answering it required us to look beyond the visible outcomes of community work and consider the relationships, decisions, responsibilities, and values that sustain it.

As PhD students at the University of Minnesota, we came to SEAD from different academic backgrounds: Fatemeh from Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and Reza from Theatre Arts & Dance. We joined the organization hoping to contribute our skills while gaining direct experience working alongside Southeast Asian communities, including Hmong, Lao, Khmer, and Vietnamese communities. 

Learning what we don’t know.

Working across these four Southeast Asian communities challenged us to recognize the limits of what we knew. Hmong, Lao, Khmer, and Vietnamese communities have distinct histories, cultural traditions, values, languages, and ways of preserving and sharing collective memory. There were moments when community members referred to memories, historical experiences, or cultural practices that we did not fully understand. Our supervisors generously provided historical and cultural context, but these moments reminded us that community engagement requires more than professional expertise or good intentions. 

Indeed, neither of us anticipated how much the experience would complicate and expand our understanding of community-engaged work.

Mohammadreza Izadi Hemmatabadi, Fatemeh NasrEsfahani, and The SEAD Project's Co-Executive Director Kaysone Syonesa

Our responsibilities drew directly from our academic and professional backgrounds, while reflecting the wide range of work done at SEAD. Fatemeh focused primarily on program evaluation, developing surveys and feedback tools for initiatives such as Mekong Journeys, SEA Roots, the Colors of Southeast Asia (COSA) Festival, and SEAD’s strategic planning process. Reza worked on digital projects, including SEAD’s website. We also collaborated on strategic planning, research, community input strategies, event preparation, and outreach.

Yet some of our most meaningful learning happened beyond our assigned projects. We had opportunities to observe the less visible side of nonprofit work. In addition to our weekly staff meetings, we participated in meetings connected to community events and programs, including planning for the COSA Festival. In these meetings, we witnessed conversations with city representatives, vendors, board members, and community partners. These experiences allowed us to see the tremendous amount of work behind something that, to the public, might simply appear as a community festival or cultural event. Questions of funding, permits, venues, vendors, artists, partnerships, accessibility, and community representation all had to be considered.

Letting values be the guide.

Most importantly, we learned that these are not simply logistical decisions. For a nonprofit organization working with communities whose histories and voices have often been marginalized, even seemingly routine decisions can carry significant consequences. Who is invited? Whose stories are represented? Which partnerships make sense? How should limited resources be distributed? And what happens when the expectations of outside individuals or organizations do not align with the needs and values of the communities? 

Our experiences at SEAD taught us that, in these difficult moments, an organization’s mission, vision, and values can serve as an essential guide for decision-making. Community work sometimes requires saying no, even when saying yes might initially seem easier. Effective community work therefore requires clarity about what an organization stands for, to whom it is accountable, and what it realistically has the capacity to do.

This raised another difficult question: 

Can community work make everyone happy? 

Our experience at SEAD suggested that it cannot, and perhaps making everyone happy should not be the goal. Working across multiple communities means recognizing differences in histories, experiences, and needs. The responsibility is not to satisfy everyone at every moment but to listen carefully, remain accountable, represent communities thoughtfully, and provide meaningful support where possible.

Leaving with lessons and more questions.

By the end of the summer, the question we had been asked at that weekly meeting no longer seemed simple. We are leaving this internship not only with new practical skills but also with a deeper appreciation for the less visible dimensions of community work: listening, negotiating, building trust, making difficult choices, and remaining accountable to shared values. 

We also leave with questions we have not fully answered. What place will community work have in our own professional lives? What values will guide us when we do this work? And how much of ourselves are we willing to give, while also learning how to sustain ourselves?

Grounded Knowledge gave us the opportunity to witness the complexity, care, and labor that sustain it. We entered SEAD hoping to contribute what we knew. We leave with a greater appreciation for how much we can learn when we observe, listen, and allow communities themselves to reshape what we think knowledge, and community work, can mean.