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Quyen Vuong - When living in a Malaysian refugee camp as a teenager, apart from her parents and with only a younger brother by her side, Quyen Vuong promised herself that she would one day return to help other Vietnamese refugees. True to her word, Quyen worked in a camp for the United Nations upon graduating from Yale, but this, it turns out, was just the beginning.
Today, with the Vuong family finally reunited, Quyen gives back to her community in many ways. In addition to running her own non-profit organization, Quyen and her husband support the Asian Pacific Fund and gave generously to its endowment campaign. They believe that an endowed fund establishes the Asian Pacific Fund as a permanent resource for non-profit organizations and individual donors who want to help Bay Area Asian Americans.
An alumna of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and also a devout Buddhist, Quyen sees her gift to the Fund as a strategic investment and the right thing to do. The Fund provides support and guidance for Asian community groups, and Quyen knows firsthand how important this can be, especially for small organizations. Individual Asian ethnic groups cannot do everything on their own, she says, and the Asian Pacific Fund helps everyone address the wide array of community problems often ignored in mainstream settings.
Both Quyen and her husband say the Asian Pacific Fund fills an important role and has special purpose in this region. The issues that face Asians may change over time as the population grows, and by building the Fund’s endowment, Quyen and her husband ensure that the Fund will be there to help well into the future.
Quyen currently serves as the executive director of International Children Assistance Network, which helps children in Vietnam stay in school and also runs violence prevention programs for Vietnamese children and parents in the Bay Area. She is also on the Board of the Pacific Links Foundation, which encourages the sustainable development of Vietnamese communities by promoting knowledge exchanges for professionals in Vietnam and the developed world.
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