Meet the Team: Sandy Tran

Sandy Tran, Prismatic's Development Officer, is a dynamic leader with a background shaped by her Vietnamese heritage and commitment to community impact. A Walker Cup recipient at DePauw University, Sandy's dedication to education led her to Teach for America, where she served as a middle school English teacher in Hawai’i. Returning to Chicago, she excelled in development at Noble Schools, raising significant funds and managing key donor relationships. As the founder of Bold & Write LLC, Sandy continues her mission to connect grassroots organizations with the resources needed to amplify their impact.

Why is Prismatic’s mission critical to you? 

With Prismatic, we know how to actively listen to our communities. Prismatic came about because we wanted to provide mentorship and the knowledge of what it takes to be in a workplace and why EQ is so important to have in a company and your life. A lot of our students have the opportunity to pair social-emotional learning curriculum with the content they're learning already. 

With leadership, we want to help students define what their place is in this world. Our curriculum helps them ask questions like, what is your mission? What are your interests? How does that align with you? In addition to helping with this exploration, they also get exposure to real professionals telling students about their own journeys.

I think a lot of what Prismatic is doing is giving students the real deal, preparing them, and not sugarcoating the professional world. We want to ensure that students feel prepared, and in order to be prepared, they're getting a lot of exposure to what professionals are doing and how they are navigating the world. It’s an opportunity for young folks to take that in, learn from it, and do even better.

It's kind of like passing that baton, right? Once you have the baton, what are you going to do with it? Hopefully, take it and run with it to make the world and workplace even better. This is the hope with Prismatic.

What is one of your most memorable experiences in the classroom? 

When I was a teacher, one thing I realized that students really craved was human connection, especially at middle school age. At that level, they're still defining who they are, while the world is trying to shape who they are. So there are a lot of different influences, and deep down, what I really wanted to instill was that you get to create who you want to be; you get to create what you want to do in this world as well. 

With that in mind, I needed to really dive deep into social-emotional learning. SEL provides educators a way to teach students how to self-regulate, understand their emotions, understand who they are as human beings, and when challenges come up, how to navigate that.

It's the life skills that we need, period. So I added that in the classroom, I saw my students open up, build community, and understand that they, as human beings, have so much to give. 

What's really important was that they felt like they had purpose and that they wanted to do something to give back. I think that's the thing about EQ, essentially, it provides skills to better understand people and be a more compassionate human being. Once you have that, you have a purpose to do something better for the world and give back to younger generations or your community in ways that you never thought imaginable. 

So it's essential that we teach these skills to young people and foster our students’ knowledge of themselves and their communities.

Why is it essential to teach EQ skills to young adults? 

When I think about someone who has emotional intelligence, I think about a leader who just knows how to go into spaces and operate. They know how to read the room and they know what they can contribute because they are very confident in what they bring to the table.

People with high EQ, in my opinion, are the leaders and the bosses that people want to work for. They are the leaders and folks winning actual awards because they're really great human beings and contributing a lot to the world. The more we focus on helping students build their EQ skills, we will encourage young folks to be compelled to do something bigger for the world.

What excites you most about working with Prismatic and supporting their mission to leverage social-emotional learning to teach students important life skills? 

My passion stems from being a classroom teacher. My first job out of college was being an English teacher for seventh and eighth-grade middle schools on the Big Island of Hawaii. In this rural, beautiful community, I had the opportunity to teach over 100, brilliant middle school students.

In order to be a good teacher, you actually have to build good relationships with your students and you need to gain their trust. As an English language arts teacher, I knew I needed to do that. So I brought in social-emotional learning. I paired it with my curriculum, and I kid you not, I believe that my students love me to this day because they felt like they were given the opportunity to bring their whole selves into the classroom, their identities, their dreams, their hopes, and their aspirations. 

I found the power of social-emotional learning to be very compelling—bringing in the healing, bringing in the identity, bringing in all of the skills that my students were really craving. 

They wanted to be better friends with each other, they wanted to be better community members to their elders, and you could see it; before I brought that into the classroom there wasn’t a space for it because naturally the traditional curriculum is focused on academics.

They wanted a place to really cultivate what it means to be them in this big world and make a contribution, and they weren't getting enough of it until social-emotional learning was present in the classroom

What is your favorite self-care or community care practice, and why?

I enjoy singing karaoke, dancing to every beat, and cooking wholesome meals. I also appreciate having deep conversations about equity and justice, practicing self and community care, and hosting gatherings for loved ones.

Ready to make a meaningful impact? Discover how you can contribute with Prismatic’s Turning Point Fund.