Join us to celebrate with the community on our first victory to expand voting rights in Santa Ana!

This will be an opportunity for us to come together and celebrate with residents and community organizations that led efforts to get the Santa Ana City Council to place immigrant voting on the ballot for the November 2024 elections. We will also provide an update on what is the next step to win this measure next year!

Be a Seeding Change Fellow with VietRISE in summer 2024! Applications are open for Seeding Change’s National Fellowship Program for Asian American Organizing and Civic Engagement. This is a summertime opportunity for 18-28 year olds to build community, learn about organizing in a hands-on way with a grassroots organization, and deepen their commitment to fighting for liberation. We are building leader-full movements!

• One-week orientation and closing retreat in the Bay Area, CA
• Hands-on work with a host organization 
• Weekly zoom calls for reflection, community building, and political education

VietRISE joins partners, community organizations and advocates, and the county’s largest paper, the Orange County Register, in calling for Supervisor Andrew Do’s resignation and the completion of a thorough investigation and audit of all public funds allocated under his oversight. 

Recently, reporters at the LAist revealed that Supervisor Do did not publicly disclose his family connection when he allocated $3.1 million in two contracts to Warner Wellness Center, a nonprofit where Supervisor Do’s daughter serves as president. This issue emerges just a year after Supervisor Do was fined $12,000 last year by the California Fair Political Practices Commission for engaging in “pay-to-play” politics by steering lobbyist contracts to his own campaign donors while serving on the board of CalOptima.

Thank you to everyone who participated in our community listening session on working class identity on Saturday, November 4th! We are deeply appreciative of everyone’s candid sharings and honest perspectives on challenges experienced by working class folks and how to build class solidarity and unity. Some major themes from our discussion included the barriers of access to organizing for working class folks, mixed perspectives on the presence of class solidarity in our community, and clear alignment of what class unity looks like.

Stay on the lookout next year for upcoming community listening sessions. If you have any ideas for future sessions, feel free to reach out at lisa@vietrise.org and dwight@vietrise.org.

We grieve for the over 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza who have been killed by the hands of the state of Israel. VietRISE stands in solidarity with Palestinians in their fight for liberation, self-determination, and justice.

Over the past several weeks, VietRISE has co-sponsored several marches and rallies across Orange County for a free Palestine. We join our partners in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, humanitarian aid for Palestinians in the region, and an end to the use of our public tax dollars for military aid to Israel.

Read our recent letter to the Santa Ana City Council on December 5.

Time and time again, elected officials like Supervisor Do demonstrate that they do not intend to serve the public. In the words of our Executive Director, Tracy La, “Andrew Do has built a career pretending to be a champion for Vietnamese people, but he’s only proven time and time again that he only cares about his small circle of political allies and cronies.”

Sign the petition calling for an end to corruption. Read the article here.

Huge thank you and congratulations to our Community Economic Resilience Fund canvassing program youth interns! Quynh, Thu, and An spent their summer going door-to-door, making sure that the voices of residents in Little Saigon are prioritized in identifying ideas and solutions for building an equitable and environmentally friendly economy, one that increases the number of high-quality jobs. It has been a joy witnessing their growth in civic engagement and community outreach skills over the past two months. Thank you for spending your summer with us!