Fostering Connection and Leadership in the Vietnamese Community

Lan Dinh was just 26 when she realized that her immigrant Vietnamese community was underrepresented in leadership in and around Philadelphia. “We wanted to make sure that we were participating in decisions that affect our community,” Dinh says. Dinh was born in a refugee camp in Thailand 35 years ago and arrived in Philly as an infant. She started VietLead in 2016, in partnership with four close friends, Nancy Nguyen, Duong Nghe Ly, Tracy Nguyen, and Nga Vu. Their organization provides support and leadership to the community of 20,000 Vietnamese who have settled in Philadelphia. It also supports other Southeast Asian groups. VietLead celebrates the culture, the history, the language, and the food of the Vietnamese community while providing advocacy and social justice leadership around issues facing Southeast Asians today, like the threat of deportation.

Who started VietLead and why? What did you see that was missing?

I’m one of the co-founders. There’s a group of us, local folks who got together and realized that the community needed an organization that was serving the Vietnamese community. We also brought social justice values. We wanted to build leadership in our community so that we were more part of decisions that were made.

The other co-founders are Nancy Nguyen, a co-executive director and the campaign director; Duong Nghe Ly, a co-executive director and the operations director; Tracy Nguyen, the South Jersey health manager; and Nga Vu, the Philly health manager.

There is a large Vietnamese community around Philly. Of the total Asian community in Philadelphia, I believe we are the third largest, with around 20,000 people, not all of whom have achieved the American dream. And with the threat of deportation, many people are in danger of being sent back, and their native countries may not take them, so they end up in legal limbo.

My family are Vietnamese refugees. We came over in 1990. I was born in a Thailand refugee camp, and I came here as a baby with my four older brothers. We resettled in West Philadelphia. My parents found jobs, working in local businesses, like nail salons, and we worked our way up. It’s a glimmer of the American dream.

How do you measure success?

I see success when community members that we have worked with in the past become a part of the greater Philadelphia community and are in leadership positions, advocating for increased equity. There are students with whom we worked [at Vietlead] who are now staff at our organization. That’s a success story to me.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve had to face, to date, and how did you overcome it?

Founding the organization was the biggest challenge. We were founded back in 2016, and that was no easy task, since we were just community folks who came together with a shared vision of building an organization.

A lot of us didn’t have this kind of experience. So building the organization was very hard, and learning as we went was very challenging. We had to learn what it means to build an organization, in terms of all the administration, while simultaneously building the organization.

For instance, how do we respond to the different political and social conditions that arise? We were founded during an increased time for deportations and the pressures on our community were high. It was the first Trump administration, and we went through a lot of violent times and then the pandemic.

As a very young organization with very young leaders, it tested our resilience. But it’s going to be nine years in 2025. We have shown we have the ability to re-center our values and to focus on what we want for our organization and our community.

Deportation is in the news right now, and it’s distressing to say the least. Is working on this issue part of VietLead?

Deportation is a big issue impacting the greater Southeast Asian community, including the Vietnamese, the Cambodian, the Laotian, and the Mon communities. A lot of it is connected to [the ‘80s and ‘90s] when refugees were resettled in the United States. It was during a time domestically when there was a lot of turmoil.

Philadelphia is among the many cities where we were settled; it caused a lot of folks to experience poverty. I experienced it myself with my family. We lived in harsh conditions, and also tense racial conditions. There was a lot of anti-Asian violence that really became visible during the pandemic. Some talk about it as if it started then. Although it became hypervisible during the pandemic, it started way before then.

How did this make you want to get involved, at a very young age?

It started during our resettlement, after the war ended. There wasn’t a resettlement system that supported the integration of the Vietnamese into cities. This created conditions that were worse than you would expect. [From 1975 through 2002, an estimated 800,000 Vietnamese arrived in the United States as refugees.]

We were fighting for survival, and folks were trying to protect themselves and their families. And many families were living in poverty. That pushed some folks to commit crimes. And what’s so tragic is that a lot of those folks did serve their time, but because of different policies that were passed later, they faced possible deportation.

But they are not being accepted back into their countries. So they end up in limbo, not able to stay or to go back. It’s similar with other Southeast Asian countries, and so we saw a heightened deportation of Southeast Asians, who have the highest rate of deportations out of any ethnic group. When I was 16 or so, my mind was blown by all this, and I wanted to try to give back and help. I read every newspaper known to man, and I needed to get involved.

What’s been your biggest win or what are you most proud of?

I’m most proud of all of the young people who we’ve been able to work with, more than 300 who are now young adults, who have learned about their cultures and their countries. Seeing the generational impact and difference that it makes when they learn about their history, their foods, and how our society works. We have a youth leadership program where they can learn about the history of their countries and their communities.

They also learn how power works, how systems of oppression work and we give them tools to help them name their experiences. Many of them are first- or second-generation who only speak Vietnamese at home, but it’s definitely a range. We also work with recent immigrant students.

I’m also pretty proud of a documentary we made called Taking Root that tells the story of the resettlement of South Asian refugees in Philadelphia. It documents three stories of resettlement, and I actually started researching it in the archives of The Inquirer. It came out in August 2023 at the Tribeca Film Festival. I was one of the producers, and it was made entirely by people in our community.

How do you find new members, or do they find you?

It’s a mix. We do active recruitment like community outreach for our programs. But all of our programs have different entry points. There’s a growing number of folks we see each year that want to belong and make a connection to other folks who share similar identities. And many people like giving back to their community. It’s so great.

“Because of the history of the traumatic experience of refugee resettlement, our folks have been resilient.”

When someone donates to VietLead where does it go, specifically?

When someone donates to VietLead, it goes into our general fund, and it supports any needs that arise in the programs, like workshops. We also have a farm where we grow foods like bitter melon, water spinach, and other Vietnamese foods.

One recent workshop was about the election. We worked with young people to teach them how to disrupt misinformation about the Asian community. We wanted to teach them about all the news sources, and how to discern what is misinformation. We taught them how misinformation impacts our communities and how we can really assess what’s real, and to understand that it matters where they get their information from.

What do you wish people knew about VietLead and the Vietnamese community?

There is an Asian “model minority” myth that many people believe. Of course, many Asians have excelled and pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and are achieving that American dream. But who gets lost in that version of events is the Southeast Asian community that has really struggled. And many are still struggling.

A huge percentage of the Vietnamese community is still in poverty, still struggling with language barriers; and while we do see a lot of folks succeeding, there are still folks who need support. So while there is more representation, which is great, a lot of folks are still struggling. I think sometimes when we see stories of exceptionalism, we think that might be for the whole community.

In my eyes, there are folks who are still struggling, like One, a refugee who is facing deportation. He is a Philly-raised Cambodian refugee who has lived in the U.S. for the past 40 years, but is now being held at Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest ICE prison in the Northeast United States.

Because of the history of the traumatic experience of refugee resettlement, our folks have been resilient. We’re able to come together, despite that [history], and that’s what has made our community even stronger. The resilience of the community has supported it, when structurally, support has been lacking.

What do you hope to achieve in 2025 and beyond?

It’s going to be the 50 year anniversary of the end of the wars in Southeast Asia, from 1975 to 2025, which is a big deal. And I think the younger generation probably feels very removed from that [experience]. Their parents experienced it, but maybe some of the younger population doesn’t even know about it. Maybe their parents haven’t even talked about it.

There is such a strong resilience in our community and with it, there still is a lot of trauma. Because [the wars are] 50 years fresh, often the stories have not been fully shared, because folks have been so traumatized that they haven’t felt ready to share yet. So the stories get lost, and I think for us, it’s really important that we are working with young people to help them understand our community’s deeper history, so that they can feel more impassioned and feel inspired to continue supporting our community to heal and to thrive.

Favorite Philadelphia performing artist: My partner is a singer. I choose him! Gordon Brown.

Favorite Food: We have a farm site in Camden, NJ, and we grow cultural foods like bitter melon, water spinach, and lots of herbs. I love Vietnamese food. Definitely any restaurant on Washington Ave. My favorite is Nam Phuong.

Favorite Philadelphian in History: Well, it’s really The Inquirer! I had a fellowship with the Free Library in 2020. It was a community archiving fellowship, and I focused on Southeast Asian settlement in Philadelphia. It had been really hard for me to find out anything about it, until I started looking in Inquirer archives. And wow! They covered a lot of it. So that was my favorite historical moment, discovering all of the coverage about resettlement, and that research led to me to make the documentary.

Favorite place to go to relax? Oh, the beach for sure. I’m a Brigantine person! I go there even when it’s not hot weather. I actually love walking on the beach when it’s empty.

Favorite small business: Unrivaled Screen Printing, in Cambodia Town, run by Pheng Seng, a formally-incarcerated member of our community.

What do you wish people knew about Philly? I wish people knew how folks in Philly really look out for each other and that there is such a great amount of care and sweetness. You just have to warm up to us!

You don’t know Philly until you’ve… gone to the Southeast Asian market.

I love Philly and want to give back because… Philly raised me. And there is so much possibility and hope that exists in Philly.

LUCY DANZIGER is a journalist, an author, and the former editor-in-chief of Self Magazine, Women’s Sports & Fitness, and The Beet.

Philly Gives content is supported by the Philadelphia Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and The Lenfest Institute; and produced independently by INQStudio. To learn more about Philly Gives, including how to donate, visit phillygives.org.