VietLead has raised $250,000 as the grassroots group seeks to resolve financial crisis

The grassroots advocacy group VietLead says it raised $250,000 in less than two months, enabling it to move out of a deep financial crisis and begin to stabilize.

The money puts the organization halfway toward an end-of-year-goal of $500,000, which it said will ensure a sustainable future.

The advocate for Southeast Asian Americans announced in May that it was laying off 70% of its staff and expected its annual budget to fall by half, from about $1.6 million this year to about $850,000 next year.

Those realities still stand.

But the group said this week that it had raised significant new money, both from bigger funders like the Samuel S. Fels Fund and from smaller individual donors.

“It showed us that people really care about what we do, to the same degree we really care about the people we work with,” said program coordinator Claire Nguyen.

VietLead leader Lan Dinh said the group had made strong advances toward its $500,000 goal, adding, “It looks promising.”

Several fundraising events are planned for the fall, including additional screenings of Taking Root, a community-produced documentary series about Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees who resettled in Philadelphia after the Vietnam War.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, the 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 U.S. ally known as South Vietnam, ceased to exist that day.

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

Today, 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.

“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 May.

The financial problems developed, Nancy Nguyen said in May, after a period of accelerated growth, driven by a surge in funding aimed at increasing involvement in U.S. elections and at 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 in May that it expected to lay off 17 staff members by the end of 2025, and that the remaining 10 would see their hours cut in half. The new funding has enabled the restoration of some work hours.

“We are going through an organization revisioning process,” Dinh said Monday. “It is going to be smaller, more focused, while still building in our community. We’re having a lot of conversations on what it means to be more sustainable, and more strategic.”

The roles of the executive team are still being determined, she said.

VietLead said new emergency funding came from the Samuel S. Fels Fund, the Radical Imagination Family Foundation, and the Malibu and Gus Family Foundation. About 280 individual one-time donors and 30 new monthly sustainers had given $57,545 since the beginning of the year, the group said.

Community members gave $7,280 during grassroots outreach efforts, and donations or in-kind support came from nearly two dozen allied organizations, including the People’s Tech Project, 18 Million Rising, Free Migration Project, Juntos, Philly Asian Queer, Asian Mosaic Fund, Southeast Asian Freedom Network, and the organization’s fiscal sponsor, the Center for Empowered Politics Education Fund.

Businesses that helped raise money for VietLead included Ginza Restaurant, Ba Le Bakery, Paging 2000 Inc., Asian Palace Restaurant, and Bake with Miii.

The group said in a message to the community that it recognized its call for support was ambitious. State, federal, and foundation support has been slowed, cut, or frozen, it said, but many other people and organizations have stepped forward.

“We have always believed that our community is our greatest refuge, and meeting this huge fundraising goal in such a short amount of time only affirms this,” VietLead said. “This is our time to be supported by our community, and we are immensely grateful.”