Raising a new generation of Vietnamese leaders
When Tracy La ’17 took the podium at a high school mentorship event several years
ago, she didn’t know she was changing at least one student’s life.
“That was the first time I had ever seen a Vietnamese American woman like me, at a microphone, using her voice to speak out about immigrant rights in Orange County,” says Chloe Lynn Võ, who was in the audience that day.
Võ became one of many young people whom La has mentored through VietRISE, the advocacy organization that she co-founded to engage Vietnamese Americans in local politics to shape their communities around issues that affect their lives.
The impact of La’s leadership can be felt across Little Saigon and the five Southern California cities it spans. She has helped enact rent control, provide legal support to immigrants facing deportation, and advocate for residents affected by the recent chemical leak in Garden Grove.
“In the beginning, we were very much focused on turnout and civic engagement among 1.5 to second- generation Vietnamese Americans, to get them more active in local government and to create a program to get young people to care about advocacy,” says La. “But VietRISE quickly evolved into fighting to change systems.”
The 2016 election
The 2016 election was the crucible from which VietRISE was born, and marked a turning point in La’s own leadership.
Growing up in San Diego to parents who were refugees from Vietnam, La was interested in politics and representation from an early age. When she came to UC Irvine, she helped canvass in Little Saigon for the 2014 midterm election. She was disappointed when the election hit record-lows for voter turnout.
As a social policy and public service major, La conducted undergraduate research exploring how to strengthen civic engagement among young Asian Americans. Determined to boost voter turnout on campus, La ran for president of the Associated Students of UCI in 2016. She won, and went on to lead a student get-out-the-vote campaign that got more than half of the Anteater student body to cast ballots in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
La’s leadership on campus complemented what she was learning in the classroom. One course, in particular, reframed her thinking about political action. Taught by Claire Jean Kim, professor of political science and Asian American studies, the class debunked the ‘great man’ theory that stated one exceptional leader will change the course of history.
“The ‘Great Man’ myth tells people to wait for the right person to come along – but movements are built on collective decision-making, action, and working together,” La says. “That class really showed me it’s not just one singular person, but many people in the trenches who make change possible.”
Following the 2016 election, a group of organizations including the California Endowment, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund and the Korean Resource Center joined together to fund a grassroots effort to educate and engage Vietnamese American voters in local politics and elections.
“Among people of color, Vietnamese Americans were most likely to vote for Donald Trump in 2016, and those same voters were also most likely to be working class,” La says. “The concern was that their actual concerns and needs were not being reflected in their voting.”
After graduating from UC Irvine in 2017, La was working at the Korean Resource Center and made the perfect candidate to help launch the new nonprofit. She stepped into the fulltime leadership role in 2018, and was later named executive director.
Supporting immigrants
One of VietRISE’s first major initiatives was supporting individuals facing deportation.
Between 2016 and 2018, the U.S. tripled the number of Vietnamese immigrants it deported
and La helped make sure the community was aware of what was happening by organizing
local demonstrations, running Know Your Rights campaigns for immigrants being stopped
by law enforcement, and provided volunteers to accompany Vietnamese community members
to immigration hearings. In 2020, VietRISE helped secure the release of 10 immigrants
from ICE detention facilities, and La stays in touch with them as they have put down
roots in the U.S.
In 2025, when ICE arrests again increased, VietRISE collaborated with five other grassroots organizations to launch the OC Community Self-Defense Coalition, which helps educate immigrants about their rights and arranges neighborhood patrols to alert people when immigration officials were active nearby.
Today, La chairs the advisory council of the Orange County Immigrant & Refugee Liberty Fund, a $1.5 million public-private partnership launched in 2025 to help immigrants facing deportation navigate the legal system.
“The idea is to build an ecosystem of organizations that can support the full breadth of considerations when someone is facing deportation. Not just going to court, but finding the right attorney, securing housing,” La says. “Our strategy is legal empowerment – for the community to know how to navigate these systems, understand the policies, and ultimately shape the laws that are affecting their communities.”
Building coalitions
Although VietRISE serves the Vietnamese community, La quickly recognized the importance of coalition-building. Working with both senior citizens and young people, Latinos and Vietnamese, VietRISE advocated for rent control in Santa Ana – one of several cities that Little Saigon spans. In 2021, Santa Ana became the first city in Orange County to implement local rent control and eviction protections.
“Initially, we wanted to focus on issues for the Vietnamese community, but we needed solidarity and intergenerational collaboration to win these important policy changes,” La says.
VietRISE also evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic, with La seeing an important role providing certainty in uncertain times, including by giving out checks to immigrants who were not eligible for the federal stimulus money.
More recently, VietRISE provided leadership during the chemical leak at a weapons manufacturing facility in Garden Grove, California, that required 50,000 residents to be evacuated. During the evacuations, VietRISE helped provide translations of time-sensitive information from the Orange County Fire Authority. Since then, they’ve been mobilizing residents to speak out at city council meetings and call their elected officials to advocate for the plant to be moved out of the city.
New leaders
Now in her eighth year at VietRISE, La has grown the nonprofit to seven full-time staff, and gained a sense of confidence in her leadership – a feeling that got a boost when she completed a nonprofit management certificate at UC Irvine in 2023.
“I had been a 23-year-old in a room with 50-year-old executive directors – who offered me respect – but being young and being a woman made my position hard. It took about six years for me to really feel comfortable as an executive director.”
That kind of honesty and vulnerability resonates with other young people like Võ, who first heard La speak in high school. Võ went on to participate in VietRISE’s inaugural youth advocacy training program, where she learned about the history of Little Saigon and the role of grassroots movements. This summer, VietRISE has its fourth cohort of students in the summer Tự Lực School for Organizing, which prepares high school students to go door-to-door and speak in Vietnamese to residents about key issues like housing, the economy and immigration.
Võ continued interning at VietRISE for three years, even after she, too, became an Anteater, earning a bachelor’s in Asian American studies with a minor in education in 2025, and a Master of Arts in Teaching in 2026, both from UC Irvine.
“Over the years, Tracy was always a mentor figure for me,” Võ says. “Her leadership style is not about securing power but creating leaders who will surpass her, putting power in the hands of youth. The title of executive director comes with weight and power in itself, but she’s always going to be on the ground, working directly with young people, helping them become more civically engaged.”
Võ plans to become a teacher and bring some of what she’s learned from La into a classroom in her community.
That’s the sort of impact La was hoping for: “I’m really proud of VietRISE being a place that I would have loved when I was a young person.”
-Christine Byrd for UCI Social Sciences
pictured: Tracy La, ’17 social policy & public service. La facilitating a panel of youth canvassers during the primary election about their experience going door to door talking with voters. La organizing a workshop with Vietnamese seniors on Santa Ana’s rent stabilization ordinance, as well as their rights as mobile home residents.