This month’s City Impact Lab was hosted at Mercado La Paloma, a bustling market with excellent food that also acts as a community and non-profit hub. Tammy Tran, Senior Manager of Community Engagement at SoCal Edison, started us off by talking about her time family’s Vietnamese origins and her lifelong fight for human rights and representation. She now works to represent community interests within SoCal Edison and spoke to us about the triad she believes is critical to project success: people, ideas, and money. You don’t need to have all three, but you need to have at least two. Tammy showed us how every success or failure she has been a part of or witnessed can be correlated to this triad.
Then we transitioned to the lab portion of the morning and asked everyone present to reflect on the challenge they are currently facing at work and to rank it against Tammy’s triad. Then we all broke out into groups of three, shared our challenges and rankings, and worked together to brainstorm ways progress these challenges by focusing on people, ideas, or money. Some attendees found that they were in a position to help each other, some learned about LA-region challenges they weren’t aware of, and some were given ideas that they intended on implementing later that same day.
People were so engaged it was difficult to get everyone’s attention again to wrap up the lab. When we did, many stuck around to chat or check out the vendors. It was great seeing so many familiar faces and meeting many new and driven change-makers. See you all next month at Antioch University!
