Dang Yang is the current director of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) for the Eau Claire Area School District and is a 2026 Chippewa Valley Vanguard Honoree.
Yang is one of three Vanguard honorees, along with the UW-Eau Claire Multicultural Student Services (MSS) Office Director Caitlin Lee and the Wisconsin Farmers Union Facilities Director of Market on River Jackie Boos.
According to the Volume One website for the Vanguard Awards, the purpose of the awards is “to celebrate the kinds of leaders, thinkers, and doers who inspire others through this work and dedication.”
Yang said that before the start of his career, the event that first made him aware of systemic racism was his wrongful arrest the day before Thanksgiving while he was a student at UW-Eau Claire.
“It began a conversation in myself internally about ‘how do I explain this,’ because I don’t have the words to describe what this means,” Yang said.
Yang said he used to view discrimination through an interpersonal lens and mainly considered how it applied to him specifically before this event, which was shaped by his experiences growing up.
Yang said he spent his time at UW-Eau Claire as a member of the Hmong Student Association and was an operations team member for the previous Davies Student Center. While at UW-Eau Claire, Yang said he began to think more about the “bigger picture.”
“I remember I was very, very focused on race as a system of oppression, but, over time, even as I was a student at UW-Eau Claire, there was an increased emphasis on looking at that intersectionality,” Yang said.
After college, Yang headed to UW-Stout to take a multicultural college teaching and learning position, which he remained in for almost eight years.
Yang said the grants and research work he did there have been influential in his current work. From there, he went on to be the diversity manager for Chippewa Valley Technical College and on to the Marshfield Clinic Health System.
Finally, Yang returned to UW-Eau Claire first as the director of multicultural affairs, then to his current position.
One of the things Yang does in his current position is conduct EDI training, which he said has benefited from the relationship-building skills he learned while working for UW-Eau Claire.
“Having a really wide spectrum of touch points has really helped me better understand not just my own microscopic world of professional responsibility but also how it fits into everything else in the bigger picture,” Yang said.
Yang said that when it comes to helping students, he is usually able to help them understand concepts and terminology through telling his story.
One of the more difficult things to teach students, Yang said, is how to handle cognitive dissonance.
“What I oftentimes see is young adults leading with anger, and I understand why that happens, and so trying to help them find healthy ways to address some of those inequities is oftentimes the most difficult part,” Yang said.
When it comes to his own kids, who are in the Eau Claire schools, Yang said in a Volume One interview that he considers “the type of environment that I want my kids to grow up in.”
Yang said he wants kids to be empowered and that he works hard on the technicals, or “boring stuff,” as he put it, to make this happen. To keep this going, he said he now focuses on training the next generation to take over.
Yang said that balancing his work with time at home has been tricky in the past, but he’s improved.
“I have a ‘no-talk-about-work’ rule when I’m at home,” Yang said. “I try to limit my days to no more than 12-hour days.”
When it comes to his legacy, Yang said to Volume One that he wants his legacy to be invisible.
“When these individuals whom I’ve worked with go out and practice those particular skills and use those particular practices,” Yang said. “I don’t need to be there, because I know that I have been the one to help push and influence a little bit of the work that they do.”
Curtin can be reached at [email protected].
