Elizabeth Tolzmann: Empowering Immigrant Communities through Law and Leadership

‘If your vision is for a year, plant wheat. If your vision is for ten years, plant trees. If your vision is for a lifetime, plant people.’ This is a Chinese proverb from Artika R. Tyner’s book, ‘The Lawyer as Leader: How to Plant People and Grow Justice,’ and inspires Elizabeth Tolzmann, one of the amazing women Voices Magazine has chosen to feature. She strives in everything she does to maintain that purpose within her life map of “planting people” whether as a lawyer herself, teaching as an adjunct professor at St. Thomas, and serving on two different non-profit boards, or, as the new Assistant City Manager of Bloomington doing internal organization work, and external community engagement work.

Elizabeth Tolzmann, born in Laos, came to the US in 1980 with her parents, her sister, and her aunt, right as the Vietnam war ended. She was only one year old and her sister was only three. She spent her earliest childhood years living in a 1 bedroom apartment with her mom, dad, aunt and sister, located in the area of Minneapolis that eventually became Uptown.

Ms. Tolzmann started kindergarten not speaking a word of English. Her parents were so new to this country they were still taking ESL classes and working full time jobs to support the family. Ms. Tolzmann’s parents were well educated in Laos, her dad an engineer and her mom a nurse. But when they came to the US they were not given credit for their education and background and had to start over virtually from scratch. They both worked full time production assembly jobs, and worked second jobs as well, while the aunt stayed home to baby sit. That hard work paid off and when Ms. Tolzmann was in the third grade her parents eventually were able to buy a home in what is now the city of Chanhassen. Ms. Tolzmann and her sister attended and eventually graduated from high school in Chaska.

Ms. Tolzmann said that going to school in Chaska was great in terms of academic support and stable friendships, but it was not a very diverse community at that time. When asked if attending a school in an area with little diversity posed any challenges, Ms. Tolzmann said she doesn’t remember feeling uncomfortable. She said she just did her best and “conformed” to her surroundings. But for her sister who was slightly older, it was a little more challenging. Ms. Tolzmann said, “I think a lot of it was culture Identity. Because you know you physically look different and sometimes you feel like an outsider given the different cultural norms you have at home. For example, in my culture, we don’t do sleep overs. When I was invited to my very first sleepover, I didn’t even own a sleeping bag let alone had a ride to go to and from my friend’s house unless they lived close by. My parents always worked full time factory jobs and they also worked part time jobs. So they couldn’t take us to social events or after school activities, so that was really hard for us.”

Ms. Tolzmann’s first exposure to diversity did not occur until she attended the University of MN. According to her attending the U of M, “was the first time I felt what it was like to be in a place where I actually fit in – not so much of being part of a crowd, but more of where I could be comfortably independent in my being and be valued for my unique background amongst a sea of other students who also had different backgrounds and experiences in life.”

Ms. Tolzmann majored in Business and Marketing and was able to live on campus at the U. She said like any student “I probably changed my major 4 or 5 times. I went into film studies, psychology, considered nursing because my mom was a nurse. But I don’t know, I just didn’t feel it. And towards the end I gravitated towards the business school and felt really into being creative, entrepreneurial and into marketing. I graduated with that, but it wasn’t until my very last semester that I decided to go into law school. I got married during that time period, and we bought a duplex in St Paul that we still have to this day, and so we were doing a lot of renting and doing the landlord stuff and thought why deal with a lawyer to draft the leases…why not just be a lawyer and do it myself.”

For Ms. Tolzmann self-sustainability played a part in motivating her to be a lawyer, but that was only one part of her decision. She said, “The second part of it was really wanting to help families like my parents and their community. I’m constantly getting questions from them to interpret a document, contest a bill, or pay an invoice. I remember when we first bought our house in Chanhassen, I was only in the 6th grade, but I read and interpreted and the closing documents for them. At the time that was normal to me, I was constantly doing that. But it hit me later when I was an immigration attorney and I was doing a trial for a family from Guatemala. The family had a little 5-year-old girl with them. I was in private practice, so I had to ask for a payment, and we were sitting in a conference room at a deportation hearing, and I had to say, I’m sorry but I have to collect the final payment. And the 5-year-old got out the checkbook, and she’s writing it out to the law firm name, and it just hit me that was me 25 years ago.”