After returning from an eye-opening visit to her native homeland of Vietnam, Minh-Duc Nguyen began to explore opportunities to reach out to her community locally. “I wanted to create a place where Vietnamese Americans could connect with one another and access the resources needed to succeed in their new country,” she remembers.

Nguyen joined with several of her friends to form Helping Link, an organization geared at providing social, cultural, and educational programs to empower Vietnamese Americans. They offer English as a Second Language classes, computer literacy instruction, homework tutoring, youth mentoring, citizenship classes and a referral service for a variety of needs including housing, mental health, domestic violence, and substance abuse.

Nguyen credits the success of Helping Link to ongoing community support and a dedicated volunteer base. “We rely on individual financial contributions to sustain our programs,” explains Nguyen. “In addition, volunteers put in hundreds of hours annually serving as teachers, mentors, board members, and just about everything else. We couldn’t provide these valuable services without them.”

—Amy Besunder