{"id":221072,"date":"2019-04-03T23:55:52","date_gmt":"2019-04-04T06:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcnews&p=221072"},"modified":"2019-04-02T15:05:40","modified_gmt":"2019-04-02T22:05:40","slug":"a-business-need-turns-into-a-passion-and-a-means-for-gaining-and-using-a-voice","status":"publish","type":"arcnews","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/a-business-need-turns-into-a-passion-and-a-means-for-gaining-and-using-a-voice","title":{"rendered":"A Business Need Turns into a Passion and a Means for Gaining\u2014and Using\u2014a Voice"},"author":1432,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[237591,10372,1051],"tags":[332422,238371,278852,209192,205752],"arcnews_issues":[327822],"class_list":["post-221072","arcnews","type-arcnews","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-disaster-response","category-gis-hero","category-real-time-gis","tag-drought","tag-emergency-management","tag-napa-earthquake","tag-refugee","tag-wildfires","arcnews_issues-spring-2019","arcnews_sections-gis-people"],"acf":{"short_description":"Hoang Chi Smith, the former GIS division chief for the California Office of Emergency Services, speaks up for those who don\u2019t have a voice.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Throughout her career, Hoang Chi Smith, the former GIS division chief for the California Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), has been driven by a desire to help people and give a voice to those who don\u2019t have one.\r\n\r\n\u201cI feel a lot of empathy,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause I\u2019ve been a refugee. I didn\u2019t have a voice, and I had no control whatsoever of my destiny.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":221102,"image_position":"left","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Born in Vietnam, Smith migrated to the United States as a refugee at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975\u2014just days before the North Vietnamese government seized Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, and consolidated power. Her father was a colonel for the South Vietnamese Army, so had the family of nine stayed, they likely would have suffered political persecution, been denied economic and educational opportunities, or worse. Instead, they spent five weeks journeying by land, sea, and air to get to California via Guam.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen we landed in Guam from Vietnam, the people from the Red Cross were there and the marines were there to hand out food,\u201d she recalled. \u201cThey set up tents and tended to the sick, and it made an impact on me. I was 13, and that\u2019s an age when things kind of form your view in life.\u201d\r\n\r\nEducation was important in her household, so after completing high school, she attended California State University, Fresno, where she majored in industrial technology with an emphasis on manufacturing and design.\r\n\r\n\u201cI was always the only girl in the class and always the only girl after college to work in the field,\u201d Smith recalled.\r\n\r\nAfter graduating, she worked as an engineering technician for electrical connectors and did 3D drafting and design for aircraft components. She did a lot of work with CAD. It wasn\u2019t until she was employed at a geotechnical engineering firm, Wallace-Kuhl & Associates, that she got introduced to GIS.\r\n\r\n\u201cInitially, it was a business need,\u201d she said. \u201cWe did a lot of drawings and site plan studies for construction, for home development. Very quickly I learned that GIS provides spatial solutions and markedly improves data management because everything is location based.\u201d\r\n\r\nSmith ended up spearheading the GIS program there.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe went from paper maps to creating geodatabases of all the sites,\u201d she recalled. \u201cAnd we tried to relate the data so it wasn\u2019t fragmented.\u201d\r\n\r\nSoon, what had begun as a job requirement became Smith\u2019s passion. She started taking classes in GIS to learn more about it. But when the 2008 recession hit, she was laid off.\r\n\r\nShe got a job right away with CH2M Hill, but less than a year after she started, the company sold her division to Critigen (and the entire company was later bought out by Jacobs). It was a tumultuous period, she remembered.\r\n\r\nAround this time, in 2010, the 7.0-magnitude Haiti earthquake hit, and it struck a chord with Smith. She donated money to earthquake relief, but she wanted to do more.\r\n\r\n\u201cI felt a lot of empathy because I\u2019ve been a refugee,\u201d Smith said.\r\n\r\nShe remembers telling a senior manager at work that she was worried about being laid off again because her hours had been reduced, so she\u2019d decided to take this opportunity to do more volunteering.\r\n\r\nSmith started working with a local homeless shelter, which not only feeds visitors but also informs them about social services they can take advantage of.\r\n\r\n\u201cI saw the paper maps that they gave their clients. I was looking at [them], and I thought, \u2018How on earth can people find their way to social services or bus stops and all that?\u2019\u201d she recalled. \u201cI thought, \u2018This is it.\u2019 So I created a map for them and gave it to them.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe project made Smith realize that she had some gaps in her mapmaking knowledge, so she went back to school to earn a certificate in GIS.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy ultimate goal was [to work] with a big organization that would help people in need [during] disasters\u2014man-made or natural,\u201d she said.\r\n\r\nSmith shifted her career toward GIS. She interned at the US Forest Service and did a student assistantship at the California Department of Water Resources. She worked her way into GIS analyst and technician roles at the county and state levels before joining Cal OES as a geospatial systems analyst.\r\n\r\nHer first activation at Cal OES was the ongoing drought in the region. Each day for about six or seven months, she and her colleagues published seven or eight rolls of very large maps to send to the governor, the Cal OES director, and the different affected regions. She\u2019s not sure if anyone ever looked at the maps. They seemed to be available just in case someone needed them.\r\n\r\nFor a while, she kept her head down and learned a lot. But then the 6.0-magnitude Napa earthquake struck in 2014, and that proved to be a turning point. Her manager called the Esri Disaster Response Program (DRP) for assistance but then had to leave because of a medical emergency. Smith and her team were essentially on their own.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe were overwhelmed. We didn\u2019t have the capabilities. Everything was on paper,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen things like that happen, executives want to know what the impact is. And we didn\u2019t have any way of summarizing the impact or coordinating the data. We didn\u2019t know how to get things like damage assessments.\u201d\r\n\r\nThrough the DRP, Esri sent technical marketing specialist Jon Pedder to help out.\r\n\r\n\u201cI introduced myself to him and said, \u2018I\u2019m the most junior person here, but I really care about this,\u2019\u201d she said."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":221112,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Pedder showed Smith some tools that Esri had available, including Collector for ArcGIS, which Cal OES could apply to damage assessments, and the Esri Story Maps Journal app, which the agency could use to create a common operational picture of the situation. Smith was so enthralled by all this that, somewhat against convention, she took it to the chief of the state operations center and then the director of Cal OES. They decided to implement the technology immediately.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat was my biggest milestone\u2014to go from paper to digital to online,\u201d said Smith. \u201cAfter Napa, we had the authority and the ability to\u2026set good examples, to say, \u2018Here is a model of what we can do during an activation, and quickly.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen she eventually took over as the GIS division chief for Cal OES, Smith focused on building relationships and fostering trust among other agencies so they could share their authoritative data and work with GIS online. During big wildfires, for example, Cal OES worked very closely with CAL FIRE, so it helped if the two organizations had the same data. It was similar with the California Highway Patrol, since the law enforcement agency had maps that showed emergency escape routes and closure areas.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe used a lot of diplomacy, held a lot of exercises together, and had a lot of meetings and functions,\u201d Smith recalled. \u201cI think that\u2019s why it was really successful during my tenure there.\u201d\r\n\r\nSmith enjoyed working at Cal OES and felt like she was really helping people in need when fires, earthquakes, and other disasters displaced them in their own state. But she was increasingly feeling a tug to use her own experience as a refugee to be a voice for others.\r\n\r\nFor years, she had been writing a memoir of her experience growing up in Vietnam and being a refugee. At first, she\u2019d intended only to give it to her American-born children to show them how different her life had been from theirs. But more and more, she felt like her story could resonate with other refugees and potentially be the voice that many of them felt they lacked.\r\n\r\n\u201cI felt like I had done my work at OES,\u201d she said. \u201cCould I have stayed and done more? Of course! But it\u2019s my obligation to speak out because, if I don\u2019t, maybe nobody will.\u201d\r\n\r\nUnder her pen name, Ho\u00e0ng Chi Tr\u01b0\u01a1ng, she published her memoir, TigerFish<\/em>, in 2017. But she hasn\u2019t left her experiences at Cal OES behind, nor has she abandoned GIS.\r\n\r\nShe recently published a children\u2019s book, No Ordinary Sue: The Tale of a Heroic Pumpkin<\/em>, which follows a pumpkin who escapes from a flood and finds herself helping others along the way.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere are some questions in the back to encourage [adults] to talk about disaster preparedness with their kids,\u201d she said. \u201cIf I hadn\u2019t worked at OES, I wouldn\u2019t have thought about the importance of publishing that book.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn addition to writing and doing public speaking engagements, Smith stills makes use of GIS.\r\n\r\n\u201cI am working on some map journals to share with local groups who help\u2026refugees from the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are not monolithic, and we have different challenges.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhich is something she knows that GIS can help articulate."},{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Center","content":"Read other articles in the GIS Heroes<\/a> series.","snippet":""}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"\nA Business Need Turns into a Passion and a Means for Gaining\u2014and Using\u2014a Voice<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Hoang Chi Smith, the former GIS division chief for the California Office of Emergency Services, speaks up for those who don\u2019t have a voice.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/a-business-need-turns-into-a-passion-and-a-means-for-gaining-and-using-a-voice\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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