Vu Le Raises $60,000 for Charity at Retirement Party

Vu Le, a young Vietnamese American leader, had a 200-person party to celebrate his retirement from the nonprofit RVC at the beautiful Seattle Aquarium on Feb. 22.

Vu founded the RVC (then known as Rainier Valley Corps) in 2014. This organization helps train young people of color to take on leadership roles in nonprofits. Less than 20% of nonprofit professionals are people of color. In his six years at RVC, he helped grow the organization to 20 employees with a budget of over $3 million. It not only helps train people of color to become leaders in nonprofits, it also helps nonprofits led by people of color to do their work more efficiently. Vu is one of the most well-known Vietnamese Americans in the nonprofit world. He is invited to give speeches around the world.

“Nonprofit can be difficult to understand. I know it is not a common profession in the Vietnamese community. But it is vital that we have people who are rooted in Vietnamese culture doing this work.”

At his retirement party, many people attended, including many leaders in the nonprofit and foundation worlds. Vu is famous for his funny speeches, and six of his friends were invited to give funny speeches about Vu. Julie Pham and James Lovell were the emcees for the event. They have known Vu since his Vietnamese Friendship Association days. Stacy Nguyen, former editor of Northwest Asian Weekly, gave one of the speeches. Vu emceed Nguoi Viet Tay Bac’s 30th anniversary party.

Vu started his nonprofit career by working at Vietnamese Friendship Association in 2005, where he grew it from no full-time staff to a team of 10 and serving hundreds of people, both Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese. He is very successful in all the work that he does. He has a very popular weekly column with over 35,000 subscribers. Vu came with his family from Vietnam in 1989 when he was 8 years old.

In 2019, he decided to retire from RVC so he can spend more time raising his two young sons, both of whom have attended Hoa Mai Vietnamese bilingual preschool. He speaks to his children completely in Vietnamese at home to preserve their language and culture. His blog can be found at nonprofitAF.com.