VietRISE

About VietRISE

Founded in 2018, VietRISE is dedicated to building power with and serving Vietnamese and other immigrant communities of color in Orange County. Our mission is to advance social justice and build power with these communities through a comprehensive approach encompassing organizing, narrative change, cultural empowerment, and civic engagement.

VietRISE aims to advance social justice by addressing immediate disparities and needs within the Vietnamese community, building long-term resilience and power, and creating systemic change to empower the Vietnamese and immigrant populations in OC to organize and take collective action for social justice. Our programs target critical areas of immigrant, housing, and economic justice, which significantly impacts working-class Vietnamese communities and other communities of color. 

Our programs include:

1. Tự Lực School for Organizing -- a 12-week after-school program designed for Vietnamese American youth aged 14-18 who are interested in deepening their understanding of social justice, activism, Vietnamese history, and community organizing

2. Community Resource Hub -- where we support community members with their basic needs, which have included distributing $450,000 to undocumented Vietnamese and Latinx immigrants excluded from federal pandemic relief, accompanying community members navigating evictions, supporting formerly incarcerated and system-impacted Vietnamese and other immigrant community members with navigating post-incarceration life and deportation defense

3. Political Tours of Little Saigon -- free political education walking tours of some of the most important landmarks in Little Saigon and the untold stories of the Vietnamese community's activism and organizing throughout the last several decades.

Empowering the Vietnamese community through organizing, policy, and advocacy:

We also work to advance systems change that addresses and transforms the root causes of the immigration, economic, and housing injustices that Vietnamese communities face. These efforts include:

1. Policy advocacy -- we organize at the city, county, and state level to create and reform policy that impacts immigration and housing, such as ending ICE transfers and passing rent control, as well as strengthen and develop public programming such as the expansion of the Santa Ana Deportation Defense Fund to ensure that Vietnamese and other Asian residents have access to a lawyer to represent them in court

2. Public advocacy -- we work with community members who are facing deportation to shed light on the structural inequalities, discrimination, poverty, and mass incarceration that many Vietnamese refugee youth faced after migrating to the U.S. in the 80s and 90s, while advocating for their defense against deportation, such as through our #KeepAnHome and #Pardon4Tin campaigns

3. Coalition building -- we know that effective social change requires long-term multi-racial, cross-cultural, and multi-generational organizing for social justice. We've developed and joined coalitions that advance immigrant, economic, and housing justice where residents and community leaders are partners and co-strategists and where organizations pool together our resources to ensure the greatest impact in our work.