Most of NCVAA’s pipeline development work takes
place at the local level under the auspices of some of the member groups. For instance, the Washington, D.C. group regularly meets with young people and takes questions about the practice of law. Each year, the Vietnamese-American Bar Association
of Northern California (VABANC) awards a fellowship to a freshly minted attorney interested in practicing public interest law, specifi cally on issues and cases of interest in the Vietnamese-American community. T e non-renewable, one-year fellowship is for attorneys of Vietnamese descent or any attorney working on issues aff ecting the Vietnamese community. T e attorney works independently with the aid of this stipend. T is year the award was raised to $50,000, up from the $35,000 given annually for the past three years. Much of the fellowship is funded with a recur- ring grant; the rest of the money comes from donations from other attorneys. “It’s something we’re very proud of,” says Christine
Pham, an area attorney who is the incoming president of the Vietnamese American Bar Association of Northern California Law Foundation, the charitable arm of the group which awards the fellowship. “We are one of the few minority bars that has a public interest fellowship. T e goal is to provide opportunities for attorneys who work with the Vietnamese-American community.” T e fellowship is just one of the high-profi le programs
off ered by the Northern California group. For several years, VABANC has teamed up with the Santa Clara University law school and the Alameda County Bar to provide a monthly legal clinic in English and Vietnamese in Oakland and San Jose, according to Pham. “We vet every appointment so that they are meeting
with someone who can answer their questions,” says Pham, a Michigan native born to immigrant parents. “It takes a lot of work but we fi nd that it works better so we can assign them with the right volunteer attorneys.” She notes that a large number of Vietnamese immi- grants came here as refugees and still grapple with a
MCCA.COM
number of issues, including language profi ciency. “Many former political
prisoners [who came] here had low rates of education, high rates of poverty and suff ered from trauma,” she says. Compared to most of the other Asian-American groups, members of the Vietnamese community tend to have lower rates of income and are less likely to go to college, she says. “We want to be able to (help) on issues where they can’t aff ord attorneys—like housing, family law and immigration.” NCVAA offi cials say that the importance of this kind of
Nguyen Vu 43
help was demonstrated in a couple of high-profi le instances in the last decade. One was in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the other was after the BP oil spill in the Gulf in 2010. Both disasters had a devastating impact on the livelihoods of Vietnamese-American fi shermen and shrimpers. Several attorneys of Vietnamese descent stepped up to provide assistance. “A lot of Vietnamese attorneys mobilized and were able
to come out and act as a conduit between the government and the people,” says Nguyen. “One attorney went to Mississippi and worked full time to assist the Vietnamese fi shermen. He translated and explained (legal and compen- sation issues) to the community.” T ese collective and individual endeavors, she says,
helped affi rm one of NCVAA’s missions and that of its affi liates of serving as a valuable resource to the Vietnamese-American community. D&B
Lekan Oguntoyinbo, an award-winning veteran of several major dailies, is an independent journalist. He can be reached at
oguntoyinbo@gmail.com or on Twitter @oguntoyinbo.
MAY/JUNE 2014 DIVERSITY & THE BAR®
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