Linh Huynh to provide keynote address
The Pembina Valley Local Immigration Partnership is highlighting the successes of the past year and sharing its plans for the future at the fifth annual Connecting Cultures and Communities Celebration next month.
The gathering takes place in Morden at St. Paul’s United Church (335 Thornhill St.) on Wednesday, Feb. 5 from 6:30-9 p.m. Light refreshments will be served.
It’s a chance to network with longtime and new community members alike while learning more about how PVLIP is working with its partners to make for more welcoming and inclusive communities across southern Manitoba.
“It’s really the culmination of our last five years,” shares coordinator Elaine Burton Saindon. The agency recently wrapped up work on its first multi-year action plan and has drafted a new one to cover 2025-2030.
The celebration will include highlights from the past few years and then outline what PVLIP hopes to achieve with its four new action priorities. Details on those priorities will be released that night, but Burton Saindon explains they continue with PVLIP’s mission to help municipalities and businesses improve the integration of immigrants to the Pembina Valley and strengthen the region’s ability to better address the needs of newcomers.
“We don’t deal with immigration specifically, but we do work with the impacts of immigration more directly,” she explains. “We understand the needs and gaps in a community or organization and then we work corroboratively with multiple partners as to what’s the best solution for this problem?”
That work has led to the creation of things like PVLIP’s comprehensive toolkit for communities, businesses, and individuals to use to foster a greater sense of belonging.
“That’s one of the things that answered a lot of questions for a lot of people and in a lot of places,” Burton Saindon observes. “We all have the right to feel connected and to feel that we belong in our community.”
While raising awareness of the work of PVLIP remains a big part of the annual celebration, Burton Saindon is excited that, for the first time, the 2025 event will also feature a keynote speaker that’s sure to inspire.
Linh Huynh is a professional speaker, author, educator, and “extreme non-athlete” who has nonetheless competed in numerous marathons and ultra-marathons around the world, including the Antarctic Ice Marathon and the North Pole Marathon. She was also the first Canadian woman to complete the 4 Deserts, a series of 250 km self-supported races across some of the harshest terrain in the world.
Huynh’s journey began in Vietnam as the seventh of eight children. When she was four, her family escaped the war-torn country in a mass exodus known as the Boat People, making their way first to a refugee camp and finally to rural Canada to start a new life.
“I felt she was a great fit for our community,” says Burton Saindon. “Her personal story is common in our area … there’s a relatibility to her message that aligns perfectly with what PVLIP is all about.”
Linh’s presentation centres around living a life of intention and fearlessness, and she’s eager to share it with PVLIP supporters.
“We settled in a small Canadian town … and I really feel my years there and my family background shaped who I grew to become as an adult and the challenges that I’ve decided to take on,” she says, noting a gathering of people passionate about the work of an organization like PVLIP “is my ultimate audience, because there’s stories of growing up as a refugee, the classic immigration story, that I don’t normally get to share.
“It’s the core of who I am,” Huynh says, adding it’s exciting to be “sharing these stories that I know will be really touching, will be really inspiring and will really drive the message home that I know exactly what you’re going through, because we went through it too.”
Huynh’s driving philosophy has been to explore everything that life has to offer, and she hopes to inspire others to do the same.
“I live and breathe this message so deeply: to ‘wonder’ off the beaten path,” she says. “It just truly encapsulates everything that I feel—where is that sense of wonder and curiosity that will help extract you from a really hard place and just move you and your dreams forward?”
You can learn more about Huynh’s adventures and philosophy online at sparkingwonder.ca.
Seating at the event is limited. Book your free ticket online at PVLIP2025.eventbrite.ca.
In lieu of admission, PVLIP is accepting donations of food items for the Many Hands Resource Centre in Morden.
