Financial crisis envelops VietLead, the Philly advocate for Southeast Asian Americans. Most staff will be laid off.

VietLead, the grassroots Philadelphia advocate for Southeast Asian Americans, says it is laying off 70% of its staff amid a devastating financial crisis.

The group needs to raise $250,000 by the end of June, and $500,000 by the end of the year, to stabilize and go forward, its leaders said in a message to the community.

“As the co-executive directors, we take full responsibility for the financial management decisions that led to instability in our operations,” Nancy Dung Nguyen, Lan Dinh, and Duong Nghe Ly wrote in an accompanying letter. “These cuts, while extremely painful, are necessary for the long-term durability and sustainability of VietLead.”

Nguyen said in an interview this week that she will remain as head of the organization, while her two codirectors will eventually transition out as paid staff members.

VietLead’s annual budget is expected to fall by half, from about $1.6 million this year to about $850,000 next year, Nguyen said.

The financial problems developed, she said, after a period of accelerated growth, driven by a surge in funding aimed at increasing involvement in U.S. elections and combating both the COVID-19 epidemic and the rise of anti-Asian hate. Now that funding is gone, along with support money for youth programs, at a time when philanthropic giving has also declined.

The organization said it expects to lay off 17 staff members by the end of 2025, and the remaining 10 will see their hours cut in half. Those figures could change slightly.

VietLead now has shifted its work to aggressively pursue fundraising strategies but “will only be able to truly weather this phase with our community’s support,” it wrote Tuesday.

“Together, we’ve won campaigns, developed new generations of leaders, and built deep, intergenerational relationships grounded in justice and self-determination,” VietLead wrote. “However — like many other movement organizations — we’ve also had to learn the hard lessons of running a nonprofit organization, including maintaining our organization’s financial stability [amid] the current hostile fundraising climate.”

The group asked for contributions.

Nguyen said people are coming forward to offer emergency grants, free services, and fundraising ideas.

“We’re going to lean into that, and we’re going to rebuild,” she said, “and that’s the work ahead.”

The financial disaster comes as VietLead and other groups mark an important moment: the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, driver of a historic refugee crisis that saw three million people flee Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

The war ended on April 30, 1975, when North Vietnamese forces advanced south into what was then Saigon, unifying the country under communist rule. The Republic of Vietnam, the United States’ ally, ceased to exist that day.

In the months afterward, about 125,000 Vietnamese were evacuated to the U.S., and more came later. Many were resettled in South Philadelphia, where they worked to make new lives in a strange and often unwelcoming place.

Philadelphia is home to about 123,000 Asian people, including about 15,000 Vietnamese, 9,000 Cambodians, and 1,200 Laotians.

VietLead, founded in 2016, serves Southeast Asian communities in Philadelphia and South Jersey, helping provide food, medical care, youth empowerment, and civic engagement.

The organization has led or taken part in key Asian social justice movements, including the recent battle to stop a new Sixers arena from being built near Chinatown.

Back in 2009, before the group was formed, Nguyen, then a young organizer, was key to halting violence against Asian Americans at South Philadelphia High School, where Ly helped organize his fellow students to make change.

Their efforts helped compel the Philadelphia School District into settlements with the federal government and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission that mandated broad changes in how complaints of harassment and violence are handled.

More recently, VietLead has led what it calls community defense — including campaigns against deportations.

Under the first Donald Trump administration and then under President Joe Biden, the U.S. deported increasing numbers of Asian immigrants, particularly Southeast Asians, many of them refugees who had lived in this country for decades. The two administrations often sought to remove people based on old criminal convictions.

In Philadelphia and elsewhere, detentions and deportations of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians, and Chinese provoked a crisis for communities that already were often ignored. Many people were deported to the nations from which their families had fled.

This month, immigrants from Vietnam and Laos were among those put aboard a deportation flight to South Sudan, which a federal judge said violated his previous order on due process. The Department of Homeland Security said many of those on the flight had violent criminal histories.

In addressing the Philadelphia community, VietLead’s directors said they were taking concrete steps to stabilize the organization, working with financial consultants, establishing oversight systems, and investing in training to align organizational values with financial stewardship.

“Our leaner team remains as passionate and committed as ever to the political vision of our work: building Southeast Asian leadership and power … in solidarity with other working-class communities of color,” they wrote. “We commit to growing Vietlead stronger and more resilient than ever before.”

The group said it needs contributions to meet immediate obligations that include staff severance and core operations. And it said its financial problems reflect a broader crisis among social justice organizations, which are “led by people with deep roots in base-building, organizing, and political education, but without the backend infrastructure or support to sustain large budgets and growing teams.”

They are called on to meet urgent needs in communities that have been historically underfunded, without having resources to do so.

“This situation was further exacerbated by the current political challenges,” VietLead said, “including federal funding cuts under the Trump administration that eliminated critical safety nets and erased the limited financial buffers we had built.”