Ming-Jinn Tong | 00:00  
In other words, the more power a person has, the less aware they are of their possession of that power or even of how that power works. But the opposite is true. The less power a person has in their life, the more aware they are of how power functions in relationships. And so I like to say to people, if you wanna learn about power, go learn from people that have experienced a level of powerlessness in their life. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 00:47  
Welcome to the Cultural Agility Podcast, where we explore the stories of some of the most advanced Intercultural practitioners from around the world to help you become culturally agile and succeed in today's culturally complex world. I'm your host, Marco Blankenburgh, International Director of KnowledgeWorkx, where every day we help individuals and companies achieve relational success in that same complex world. Welcome everybody to this next episode of our Cultural Agility Podcast. And I'm very excited about today's recording because we have some pretty special gentlemen in the studio with us. Ming -Jen, Tom and Andy Gray, thank you so much for joining us. I have heard about your work. I've had the privilege of working with Ming -Jen and seeing him use cultural agility in fantastic ways. And Ming -Jen said, you have to bring Andy on the program and allow us to tell some of the things that we're involved with. 
So here we are. Today is the time to hear that story. 
So thank you for joining us. And as we always do, it seems to have become tradition here that everybody who comes on the program introduces himself. 
So Ming -Jen, who's Ming -Jen? Andy, who's Andy? Tell us your story a little bit. 
Ming-Jinn Tong | 02:12  
Sounds good. Marco, it's so great to be here. I've been anticipating this opportunity to sit and have this conversation and Andy's so glad to see you as well. 
Yeah, so my name is Ming -Jen Tong and live here in Minneapolis. And I'm the founder of a company called Cultivate. And my mission is just to help people connect across cultures. 
So we do that through training, coaching and relationships. 
Andy Gray | 02:46  
Hey there. Good to see you Marco. Wonderful to meet you finally face to face miles across the ocean, of course, but I do live in Minneapolis as well. Good friends with Ming -Jen Tong and we've had some wonderful opportunities to engage together, blending the organization that I've started, which is called Catalyst for Harmony. It's about focusing on how to advance racial harmony together, leave in a high value of working together towards common goals. And the intersection of some of the work and concentration of focus that Ming -Jen has and I have, I think they've served a couple of our clients really well. It's been exciting to see what's happening and what may come. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 03:34  
That's a great beginning. And what always intrigues me is, people in our network around the world, they don't just step into cultural agility, Intercultural intelligence type of work. There's always a backstory. 
So I'm just curious, how did you end up in this place where this has become a very important part of who you are, but an important part of how you wanna make a difference in the world? 
Andy Gray | 04:05  
Well, I guess at the glaring dysfunction could be a part of what compelled me. I think I have personal stories that have touched my life, that have dealt with different ethnicities and cultures and stirred on my being a long time ago to try to be a confluence of that work and community. Minneapolis, I would say it's an international harbor, if you will, last 20 years and the movement of people globally that has impacted our community. I was a transplant here some 30 years ago from Michigan. 
So not too far over a pond, but not the big pond, just Lake Michigan. And yeah, Minneapolis has a unique history. It's often rated one of the top cities for a certain ethnicity to live in here across the country. It makes the top five, sometimes the top three, one of the Western suburbs. It is on the top three of the worst places for African -Americans to live by various standards. And I've seen communities, churches, all different kinds of places segmented and compartmentalized. And that's a sense of brokenness that I think I just have a passion to engage with and try to help. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 05:36  
That's beautiful. Min Jin. 
Ming-Jinn Tong | 05:40  
Yeah, for myself, I grew up in a Taiwanese home. I was born and raised in the US. And so all my life, I was very aware of the just enormous differences that I experienced in my home and outside my home. 
So the expectations placed on me as a Asian -American were half very Asian and the other half very American. And as a kid, you don't really understand what's happening to you. As a kid, you don't really even understand that that's actually two worlds that are coming together. And it wasn't until I think I got older and I began to realize not everyone has the same assumptions about say older people or how you act in a community. And when I went to college, I actually studied Intercultural studies. And that's when I started to have some category formation, things like people versus time orientation, direct versus indirect communication. And really it was, and Marco, you're a part of this story. 
So when I first met you about 12 years ago, I think it was 2010 in Colorado at a conference. And I came across, especially you at the time had your 12 dimensions organized in a wheel. And I remember when I saw that, I just thought, wow, this is the most advanced and comprehensive understanding of all of these cultural realities that I was experiencing through my bicultural experience. 
So it's been a part of my life to be bicultural, first in an unconscious state. And now more recently, not just in a conscious state, but in a state of wanting to help people to see some of the, what you might call a problem or what you might label with a moral judgment. I wanna help people step back and think, well, let's take a minute and think first about the categories where these moral judgments seem to be required. And let's first understand where are people coming from before we bring out our judgments. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 08:08  
Yeah. Yeah, that's incredibly powerful. And I remember, Ming -Jin, when we started talking before you actually joined one of our certifications, you expressed some of the desires you had in terms of really, this might sound cliche, but really making a difference in this world and helping build bridges between people. One of the things that we are passionate about is this whole idea of relying less on the outside wrapper of who we seem to be as human beings and really connecting at the heart level. And that is something that people, it's sometimes hard to explain to people. 
So because in the cultural space, people always say, which country are you from? You're going to Japan. The Japanese do this. 
So you need to learn the tips and tricks. In which way has that been profound for you, Ming -Jin? I think especially of you, since you joined the certification, that whole idea that we rely less on the outside wrapper and really say every person is unique as a cultural human being. And we try to build bridges between one unique human being and another unique human being. 
Ming-Jinn Tong | 09:28  
Yeah, that's actually been profoundly helpful for me. Maybe I'll start with this. 
So I remember being, especially in maybe third grade, fourth grade, and I lived in both Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I was born, and middle of third grade moved to Miami, fourth grade there, fifth grade in Washington, DC. And then after that, I was in LA. 
So I lived all over the country. And with my little Asian Chinese boy face, I would go around to different places. Out and about. And especially majority culture people, they would look at me and they would hear me talk and they would say, wow, your English is so good. I wanted to reply to them, your English is impeccable. Let's all celebrate, I guess. 
So what that indicated to me was, hey, when you look at me, apparently you see something that I don't identify with. So there was a discrepancy between the way others viewed me, mainly my Chinese face, and the way I viewed myself, which wasn't necessarily a Chinese American identity. It's just, I'm just me. I'm just here. 
So that was the first indicator I had in my life that there is some kind of discrepancy between the way I'm perceived and the way I perceive myself. Moving on then, the next iteration of self -identity was in actually saying, you know what, I'm not necessarily, because I would go to Taiwan as well, right? I would travel to Taiwan and they would all say, you talk a little bit funny. 
You know, your Mandarin is not perfect. And they would say, you must eat a lot of hamburgers because you're a little bit heavier than all of your cousins. 
So I didn't fit in there either. I didn't fit in Taiwan. I didn't fit in the US. And I kind of thought, well, I guess I must not have a home. I'm not really sure where I belong because I'm a foreigner everywhere I go. Then I began to find some comfort in what I would call Asian American identity. And that was later in my youth, you know, during junior high school. I found many people in Southern California that were just like me, Asian Americans. But even that, I would say, was not a final or satisfactory cultural identity. 
So in Intercultural intelligence, I feel like one of the most powerful effects of understanding Intercultural intelligence, especially the categories of three colors of worldview, 12 dimensions of culture, is that it really begins to ask the question, what even is culture? What are the categories you would use to describe culture? Is it holidays that you observe? Is it the clothing that you wear? Is it the food that you eat and when you eat it and what instruments you use? 
So by using the categories of worldview and cultural mapping of yourself and the preferences you have across the 12 dimensions of culture, I was very helped to be more comfortable in who I am and understanding even the heritage and the different parts of Asian heritage, American heritage that have formed me for who I am today. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 13:09  
Wow. And there's so much more to that story, but thanks for trying to summarize it. 
Yeah. So both of you work and live in Minneapolis and you already alluded, Andy, earlier on to some of the challenges that Minneapolis has as a city. It seems that bridge building is a great necessity in communities, creating culture together maybe. I don't know if that's even happening, but I'm wondering when you think about this idea of equipping people to be more culturally agile, to be equipped to build bridges, how do you see that play out, Andy, in Minneapolis? What have you seen already and what could it possibly mean for a city like Minneapolis? 
Andy Gray | 14:02  
Yeah. You know, that's a great question. And we are in a place where many years ago, the main bridge through our town collapsed. I don't know if you remember that story, but it's the main artery of north to south on the Minneapolis side. And it crumbled and fell apart and people died. It was a tragic scene. And I even have a friend that was on the bridge at the time that is still having impacts from that. And what happened was that the dynamics of the bridge were not built for holding the load of what it needed to do. And eventually the weight of that, time of that, the bridge came collapsing down. And I would say relationally and culturally between ethnicities and cultures here, which are many, the infrastructure of building those bridges has not been constructed well. And people have not been sourced and trained with the tools to bear the load for what is happening. And I would say in some ways it shows up in a cultural immaturity, a lack of elasticity to be able to bear those things and work at what do we have in common? How do we handle stresses and strains and the differences that we have? How can we be rooted in an identity where we have confidence in ourself, but we can be elastic enough to spread our understanding to one another? And our culture here in the US is being really conditioned for polarization. It presses you to pick a side. The whole political scheme is that way. Two dominant sources that push you to choose. And at the same time, to take the biggest brush you can find and paint the other side as all of that and more and wrong. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 16:16  
And as you're talking, you're mentioning some big issues. I'm just curious, what have you seen? Maybe you could share one or two stories where you say, wow, this gives me hope. This keeps me going. 
Andy Gray | 16:33  
Yeah. I think one of the things that's given me the most hope in our city is we've done something called Sankofa trips for a few years. And we've taken three trips with leaders in communities, faith communities in particular, on these trips called Sankofa, which is a West African Ghanian word, which means go back and fetch it, pick up what was left behind so you know what to do going forward. And so this trip consists of two people partnered together of different ethnicities. And we probably have maybe three dozen total. We fly down to the South, which was the prominent locations of the civil rights movement of the 60s. And we have gone on this multiple day excursion where you're hearing history or understanding how people navigated the stresses of those times, how they pulled together different communities and confronted some of the dynamics that were very problematic from the Jim Crow era and violations of civil rights. And of course, a lot of movement and tragedy happened during the 60s. And the apprehension that Euro -Americans and African -Americans that the tension can be palpable on the front end of that trip can be concern, distrust. I'm not sure what it's gonna be like to walk through the intensity of this subject and the emotions that I'll feel in doing that in a multicultural context has not been common for most of them. And so you kind of come to that as acquaintance, but through that experience of learning that history, and I would say it gives us an opportunity to feel the weight of that history together. By the time you get to the other side of the trip, four or five days later, it starts to feel like we're family. We've experienced something together. And out of that, when the COVID crisis hit, we had an understanding because of our historical grasp, this is gonna land on different communities unequally. 
So what can we do to prepare for that? And we created something called the One Fund. We created a mechanism for people to be able to give and share resources, knowing that there would be different needs. Almost a million dollars was pledged over the course of the year, and gifts were prepared and given to the places that needed it the most. But all of that was driven by those three years of 36 participants that went on those trips together. They were all the first to come forward and became rallying voices for stepping into this situation and being there for each. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 19:26  
Other. Wow. That sounds like a really special experience. And very, I would almost say uncommon. Very often in our work, we talk about, what do we put at the center of the journey? Do we put the relationship at the center of the journey? Or do we put the problems we have between us at the center? And I think Ming -Jun, you've seen that when you, you're not ignoring the problems, but you first build relationship. 
And then in the context of relationship, those problems actually become discussable, become safe. I know Ming -Jun, you've been working on bridge building and both of you have been working on stuff together. I'm just curious, Ming -Jun, any other examples of where you've had a chance to use cultural agility and you've seen that bridge built, you've seen that relationship come alive, even in the context of maybe some hard stuff that was still between people? 
Ming-Jinn Tong | 20:27  
Maybe if I could approach that question with some personal experience on the Sankofa journey. So if you want to go forward in a relationship with someone, but the common understanding of each other's reality is unknown, if I don't know where you're coming from, you don't know where I'm coming from, it's very difficult to build a bridge of the right strength for the future. 
Kind of like the example that Andy brought up of the bridge over 35W falling into the Mississippi River. Apparently no one ever foresaw that steel, that thickness would be required until everyone knew that it wasn't enough. 
So for myself, we often talk about blindness, right? So in Intercultural work, we often talk about, we need to help people to see, but what if it is we ourselves that are blind without knowing it? The nature of blindness is that you can't see. And so you can't even see the blindness that's in yourself. I remember distinctly being on the bus, on the Sankofa journey, paired with my partner, and we landed in Birmingham, Alabama. And we walked in and I was reading just all kinds of firsthand accounts that were taking place in Alabama. And I remember going to one of the walls and I saw a letter that was printed out and posted in the exhibit. And I read it and it was all about doing right? Doing right by the African American community. And it was talking about how these organizations in Birmingham were doing as much as they could, as fast as they could. And the end request in that letter actually said, and so Dr. King, we urge you not to undertake the protests that you are doing and let us, the natives of Birmingham, continue on the journey we've been on. And turns out that letter was actually the letter that prompted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. To write his famous letter on the edges of a newspaper called the letter from a Birmingham jail. And I was so immensely convicted by that because as I read the original letter, I thought yes, this makes so much sense. I am so glad to see the people of Birmingham stepping up for racial justice. And it was actually Dr. King's perspective that said, hey, justice delayed is justice denied. In other words, in myself, I carried the mindset that actually needed to be corrected. 
So here I was thinking, I'm trying to help, but I'm finding that within myself, my own instincts are blind. And so to have my eyes opened was a very powerful moment. Essentially, what were my eyes open to? My eyes were open to the fact that I am actually a part of the problem, not fully the problem, but that I carry in myself the same thinking that was actually causing the problems, very eyeopening for me. And when you're able to see that, and you're able to express that to people that have been hurt by your mindset, like me, other people being hurt by the ideals that I've carried in my own self, that prepares the way for friendship. And so there are people that were on that journey with me that to, until today, that I'm able to have a relationship with them because there were blindnesses that were removed from my own eyes. And I think, Annie, I'm gonna pick up on the word you said earlier, there can now be safety. 
Like, you're able to see how some of your attitudes have been damaging to the heritage of my people. I think I can now begin to engage with you in ways that I was unsure of before. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 25:03  
In the world of diversity, equity, inclusion, there are so many providers in the US. There's so many approaches and methods. Mengjun, how cultural agility sort of a new kid on the block, even just having that cultural lens on racial issues is maybe a new idea for people. How does cultural agility bring something that is different or that impacts that context in a different way? 
Ming-Jinn Tong | 25:37  
Yeah, so let's take that analogy you just gave. So the picture of a new kid on the block is that there's a neighborhood with lots of houses, and maybe there's some houses that don't get along. Maybe there's some street gangs on the street, and there's a road, maybe there's potholes, there's sidewalks, maybe there's some orange tape you can't go around. And so there's this new kid walking around trying to figure out how do I navigate this particular neighborhood? And really, I would say Intercultural intelligence is not a kid walking around. It is a construction crew that is repaving the street and making sure that everyone has access to say, okay, over here, this section is the street. This is where we should be walking. This is the sidewalk, or excuse me, this is the street where the car should be driving, and this is the sidewalk where the people belong. And so what Intercultural intelligence does is it actually paves the way to have healthy interchanges between people that live on other sides of the streets. It opens up doors, it opens up locked gates for actual conversations to begin to happen. 
So one feedback that we've gotten from the organization we're working at is that one of the leaders there has said to me, hey, after the ideas of worldviews and dimensions of culture were brought to bear on the minds of the staff, they often pop into my office and say, hey, I was thinking about this situation from this new point of view. And it helped me to see this or that I never saw before. In other words, every time I wanted to go over there down the street, I always kind of walked around the block, but now we have a sidewalk and it gets me there a lot faster. And so I think of Intercultural intelligence as the conversation that our city, and maybe the world, needs to have before we dive into the difficult conversations. And maybe even more deeply, if we were to have the conversation around understanding culture, a lot of the, maybe the hotter feelings would dissipate. And it allows us to enter into conversations on a more level, paved, clean, and safe environment. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 28:33  
One of the things that is a larger conversation, we use the word power in the Three Colors of Worldview, but the word power is quite explosive, if I would say, in the US right now. How do you bring a more cultural perspective into that conversation? And how does that, maybe you have even an example of how that potentially impacts that conversation. Andy or Ming -Chen? 
Andy Gray | 29:03  
Well, as you guys were sharing the story about a neighborhood, it really brought together a very visceral memory for me. I moved a lot between fourth and sixth grade and my parents were divorced. And I think I went to seven or eight different schools in a matter of two years. But I remember coming to one school and being the new kid in that community. And I soon find myself on the ground with four kids hovering over me. Now, mind you, we're all the same ethnicity and only 20 minutes from where I had grown up, but it was a different school. 
So they're standing, hovering over me and saying to me with powerful tones, this is our school. I was a fourth grader. 
So if fourth grade kids exercise the dynamic of power and entrenchment and this identity that they had that this was ours and I didn't belong, that had a huge impact on me. One of the things that when we talked about this and where I think Ming -Chen and I's work hangs in tandem and works really well, we spent a significant amount of time talking about the value of humility and the need for it. And that needs to happen on an individual level, which people can kind of understand. 
Yeah, I should be a humble person, but entering into that from a cultural dynamic and from a organizational or institutional or company dynamic to carry that value of, let's raise the value of humility. And what the work that Knowledge Works does, it just amplifies the need for humility and to see in a broader way. And that gets to where I think agility or elasticity comes from is when people embrace, I need to be humble enough to not realize everything I think and see is actually what I think and see. There's more to this picture. And when you can raise that value in the context of a group in a company, in an organization, then the capacity for trust, I think, increases the capacity to say, let's put it this way. I think our culture right now, the best that they can put forward is, we agree to disagree. You do you, I'll do me. And that's what Intercultural looks like, your world and my world. What I think this work has done, this tool set, the capacity building it does is, I see you, I hear you, I understand you. I get the context of where you're coming from. I do disagree on what's next or what we should do, but that doesn't mean I need to stop being in a relationship with you. And we need to just be on opposite ends of the void. We can find common ground and the things that we value together. Cultural humility combined with cultural agility does that. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 32:19  
Yeah. I love the way you bring those together because people might find the word humility maybe too fluffy or something. Wow, is that something that I need? But one of the ways that we try to address that or bring that into the equation is through being a cultural learner. And a cultural learner is inherently humble because you're assuming that you just don't know it all. You're assuming that your perspective is incomplete or maybe even inaccurate. What would you say to that, Ming -Jen? How would being a cultural learner have an impact in the world of racial justice, racial harmony, the whole unconscious bias conversation? How would that have an impact? 
Ming-Jinn Tong | 33:09  
Yeah, huge impact, foundational impact. So I think we're all familiar with what they call the Johari window, a matrix of awareness and unawareness of things you know and things you don't know. And it's that last window that we want to shrink, the window that is the intersection between things I don't know and things I didn't know. I'm unaware that I don't even know it. If that particular part of the matrix is very large, then it's kind of like having maybe toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe. You don't know it's there and you didn't even know that it could be there. 
So you're not even checking the bottom of your shoe. And so, if you come in that way, I mean, in that particular scenario, that's a little bit of a personal embarrassment. I think, and I'm gonna ask this question and get back to your original question. The question is why? Why is it that there are things that we are unaware that we don't even know? And I think a part of the answer to why is that the reality, is the question about power. 
So your question earlier is the culture doesn't necessarily love to talk about power. And I would ask to that question, I say, well, let's think about that for a minute. Why is that? 
So I'm gonna go back to Andy. Andy, you were saying, hey, I don't wanna have this conversation anymore. You do you and I do me. And that's where I want to leave it. And the question you need to ask about that statement is, who has the ability to say that and who cannot? And the ability to say that means I'm okay. I can do what I want. I can go where I want. I have my needs met. Therefore, I don't need to have this conversation anymore. But on the other side of that is, hey, well, just a minute here. As you walk away, please be aware, I don't have what I need and I don't have the means to get it. And it's not because I'm lazy or stupid. There is what we would call now an imbalance of power. 
So maybe just one last thing I'd like to say about this is, I have observed that there is an inverse relationship between presence of power in a person's life and awareness of that power. In other words, the more power a person has, the less aware they are of their possession of that power or even of how that power works. But the opposite is true. The less power a person has in their life, the more aware they are of how power functions in relationships. And so I like to say to people, if you wanna learn about power, go learn from people that have experienced a level of powerlessness in their life. They will educate you on how you are using power to serve others or not. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 36:45  
So powers, discovering power maybe in new ways or learning to navigate power in new ways. We like to talk about how power can either be used to usurp and to use power for meeting the needs of others around you. It can be used to become bigger and you to become smaller, or it can be used to be life -giving, to be truly empowering to others around you. When you think of the work you've done now, for instance, Andy, you alluded to the youth project earlier on and you mentioned, Ming -Jin, you mentioned a few of the conversation shifts that happened in the office. How does a project like that and investing in cultural agility development for people involved in that project, how does that impact the community? Do you have any examples of how does that go onto the street? How does that go into the families, into young people's lives? What does that look like? 
Andy Gray | 37:48  
Yeah, my first thought is that the pressure to assimilate, I think, goes down and the experience of acceptance goes up. So I think without cultural agility, people, because they can be so confident in their perspective and the way that they see things, I think what I see people experiencing in community is they'll make a statement, this is a youth -focused organization that is trying to help teens find hope. 
I mean, it's a great purpose, right? And they would, of course, say, we wanna help any and every teen, any teen find hope. It doesn't matter who they are, their ethnicity, their culture, but if you don't have an understanding of how you use culture, how much that lens overlays your perspective of here's the pathway to hope, you don't realize how infused that is with your cultural lens, and it can feel like somebody that's coming from maybe a very different cultural familial context. 
Well, if I get on the road, I'm gonna experience all kinds of acceptance versus what I think cultural agility does is it expand, it makes the pathway much wider and allows people to get on it sooner, and it doesn't have the same adherences. Like you don't have to think this way or process feelings and emotions this way in order to be moving towards a hopeful future. And as the leader in the community, they're gonna have a greater capacity to understand and meet young people where they're at instead of, well, I meet you, and as soon as you get over here, this is when I can really start helping you. But that's what I would see happening. And I don't have to check all of who I am at the door in order to experience the fullness of what's here to be offered. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 40:07  
That's beautiful. 
Ming-Jinn Tong | 40:08  
If I could throw an example out there, I'll just pick up, Mark, there's something I've heard you say actually recently, which is, if you undergo an assessment of your three colors of worldview, where you are at, the percentages of your motivators, demotivators, does not indicate your flexibility or your agility. It only indicates where you're at. Doesn't say anything about your skill level or your adaptability level. And so I have in my mind a particular example of one of the staff members in this organization. And according to the three colors of worldview, they are very much in one worldview with much smaller influence from two of the other ones. However, this person shared an experience that they had with me about entering into a community that was very different than hers, very ethnically different, socioeconomic levels are different. And at first, this person was not received because of their appearance, but because of the great investment of relationship that this staff person had with one of the students in the family, over time, they came to be accepted. It doesn't mean that this staff person lost their identity or changed who they were. They still are who they are. But through Intercultural intelligence, being able to build a relationship with a student, that opened up an entire gateway of what they called safety. 
So what was said about them was, don't worry, this is a safe person. And Intercultural agility is the key that unlocks the ability to have relationships, deep relationships. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 42:17  
We could probably keep this conversation going for a few hours. And I can feel your passion and the empathy that you have and the desire to make a real difference. And in this space, there's an enormous amount of work to be done. If anything, I think we've gone backward and we could talk about that for hours. But as we close, what hope do you have? Andy, you talked about hope, bringing hope to young people. What hope do you have for US, for the world in the space that you're in the Twin Cities? How do you keep going? And what do you hope to see in the next few years? 
Andy Gray | 43:00  
You know, I was invited to speak with a group of 11th graders at a high school recently about the intersection of contemporary politics, values, thought and practice, and historical perspective. Wow. I love grades. Easy subject. And one of the questions from, they asked some amazing questions, which was a huge encouragement. And they showed up an hour early before school. They did get a little extra credit and there's bagels there. 
So there's a couple of motives, but I don't know if I would have come to anything an hour early for a bagel. One of the questions was, how do we get rid of tension? And I said, you know, honestly, you won't. There will always be tension. What you have to do as young people, and this is what gives me hope, is you have to learn how to better navigate tensions, differences, disputable matters, different perspectives, different convictions, different values, different thoughts of what should be done. If you can learn how to exist in a community where you can continue to have closeness and proximity in your relationship, even amidst tension and differences of opinion, that will shape our future. Our current age, many folks that I see, they just have not been well -trained on how to do that. And it's caused all kinds of problems. And young people are feeling it intensely. They feel this pressure to pick a side and choose who you're gonna align with. And that's where I think weaving in those dynamics of cultural agility, cultural humility, there's so much powerful because we live in a multicultural world and it's increasingly so. 
So that's what gives me hope. When I look at young people saying, you know what I'm seeing? It's not gonna cut it for me. That's not the kind of person I wanna be and it's not the kind of world that I wanna live with where we humanize half the people. That's not what I want. What's a different way? What's a third way? What's another cultural approach to this? 
So that gives me hope. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 45:21  
Awesome. Mingjin, wrap us up. 
Ming-Jinn Tong | 45:25  
Yeah, boy. I think I'm gonna go this direction here. Especially as an Asian American living in Minneapolis, where oftentimes the conversation around equity, diversity is often a black and white conversation. 
Sometimes I wonder what's my place? I'm neither black nor white. And as I was talking about Intercultural intelligence with a friend, a look of relief came over his face. He's African American. And he said, you know, I actually feel like what you just shared takes a ton of pressure off because when you want to place all of the tension that comes in talking about diversity on just two groups, and you wanna name them just black and white, us and them, this or that, of course there's a great deal of pressure that's felt on both sides. But the reality is that there is a whole collection of nations and groups and peoples that are involved in this conversation. And so let's not only talk about the bicultural, as if all of our city was a bicultural reality. It's not. It's a multicultural reality. And I think I find a great deal of hope in the tools that KnowledgeWorks has developed in Intercultural intelligence, because it says, you know what? Everyone's voice is not just welcome at the table, but needed. And as we learn to listen to all the multiple various players around the table, the pressure to be right, the pressure to be best or better than them really diminishes, dissipates, and says, hey, we all have something to learn and to give from one another. Not just my side to your side, but can we be a healthy community together? 
Marco Blankenburgh | 47:53  
Well, thank you so much for joining today. And as always, anybody listening to this podcast, we will make contact details available so that you can continue the conversation. Everybody who comes on this podcast should be reachable. That's what we believe to continue talking. 
So we will do the same with Mingjin and Andy. Thank you so much for joining us. I wish we had more time, but there's so many more questions I would have loved to ask. But thank you. Thank you for sharing your life story, sharing your perspective, your passion, your heart. And I look forward to hearing more stories of how you do what you're passionate about and create those bridges of community and relationship and create those cultural spaces where people can really flourish and live in harmony together. 
So thank you for joining us today. It's been Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Cultural Agility Podcast. 
Ming-Jinn Tong | 48:47  
Great, Marco. Thank you. 
Marco Blankenburgh | 48:55  
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