Viengkeo Kay Bounkeua, MPH

Kay Bounkeua is a student in the Racial Healing Certification Program at the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas and also serves on the board of the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty. She was the first Asian American woman to serve as a state representative in the New Mexico Legislature, where she championed language access. She has served on the board of Bold Futures NM and is a past fellow of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network and the Asian Pacific American Women’s Leadership Institute Fellowship Program. To better support communities and leaders, Bounkeua launched Ma Der Collaborations, an independent consulting business that provides services in organizational capacity and development, leadership building for emerging and current leaders, and program design and implementation through deep relationship building and storytelling, with a focus on organizations and teams that are navigating transitions.

Previously, Bounkeua was executive director for the New Mexico Asian Family Center, where she helped to spearhead prevention and systemic change initiatives for the pan-Asian community, including provision of direct services for survivors of domestic and sexual violence as well as implementation of multigenerational family programming, health education and outreach, cross-racial coalition building, and policy advocacy work. She also was New Mexico deputy state director for The Wilderness Society, working with BIPOC communities to build campaigns and programs to protect wilderness and increase access to the outdoors by supporting and integrating a new vision of conservation that acknowledges the critical role of climate justice in conservation, informed and led by Indigenous, immigrant, and other youth of color. Bringing a public health approach to the work, Bounkeua worked to improve overall community and population health and advance racial equity in the conservation movement.

Bounkeua received her master’s degree in public health from the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, where she engaged in fieldwork in New Mexico, Mississippi, and Michigan on issues such as gender-based violence, drug policy reform, disaster relief research, and maternal and child health. After graduating, Bounkeua returned to her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the city to which her parents immigrated in the early 1970s to escape the impacts of communism and war on Laos.