Linh Chuong

Linh Chuong is the Policy Chair, Board Co-Secretary, and a Southern California Chapter Lead at PIVOT. She is an assistant adjunct professor of Health Policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. However, at heart she is first and foremost the proud daughter of refugee immigrants. Through her advocacy work she developed a recognition that data is not about data, data is about (in)visibility and representation— about who gets to define the issues, set the agendas, and shape the solutions. She strives to conduct thoughtful research and use simple communication to bridge between policy, practice, and people.

Linh received her MPH in Health Policy and Management from UC Berkeley and her BA degrees in (1) Sociology/Anthropology with a Sociology Emphasis and (2) Gender and Social Justice from Hendrix College.

Kỳ-Nam Miller

Kỳ-Nam Miller is co-Secretary of the PIVOT Board, where he also serves as co-chair of the Fundraising committee as well as on the Policy committee. At work, he is an Equity Officer at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG).

Previously he worked at PolicyLink and the Greenlining Institute, non-profit organizations devoted to advancing racial equity. He spent time in Washington D.C. as an aide to Congresswoman Barbara Lee and helped on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Born and raised in the East Bay, where he lives with his wife, two kids, mother-in-law, and a very adorable Havens dog, Kỳ-Nam is a California bar-certified attorney, received his Masters from the London School of Economics, and graduated with honors from UC Berkeley, where he competed on national champion rugby and heavyweight rowing varsity teams. He has family on both sides of the Pacific and has lived and worked in Vietnam.

Khanh Nguyen

Khanh Nguyen joined PIVOT at its founding in 2017 and has served on its board since then. He is committed to working with progressive Vietnamese Americans to protect democracy and help mitigate the damages of climate change. Among his contributions to PIVOT, Khanh works on PIVOT’s election and fundraising efforts.

Professionally, Khanh is a technology leader with a 30-year career in multiple industries. He worked on pioneering research in semiconductor device manufacturing and led engineering teams at several software startups. He spent 17 years at Google, where he led teams in Search and Advertising. During that time, he founded and grew Google's Shopping Ads product to $20B in revenue over ten years.

Recently, he has focused his career on helping to mitigate the damages of climate change and is currently the Head of Engineering at WeaveGrid, a startup working to enable a smarter grid to support the accelerated adoption of electric vehicles.

Khanh arrived in the US in 1978 with his family via the Leam Sing refugee camp in Thailand. His family settled in Southern California, in the city of Hawthorne with its claim to fame as the hometown of the Beach Boys.

Victoria Nguyen

Victoria has been with PIVOT since the 2020 elections and has been involved in various committees in PIVOT. She co-led the Elections team for the 2022 Midterm elections and is currently leading the Communications team at PIVOT. She is a second-generation Vietnamese American and is passionate about uplifting the voice of the Vietnamese-American community. She graduated with her Bachelor's degree in Political Science (minored in Global Studies) at the University of California, Los Angeles and she received her Master's degree in Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. She has always had a passion for civic engagement and social causes, which led her to PIVOT.

Victoria started her career in non-profit program management and has transitioned to working in the technology sector, leading strategic website projects and marketing initiatives across various products in the E-commerce space. With this experience, she is constantly thinking about how to improve PIVOT technology and communications.

She is an avid traveler, having traveled to over 70 countries and just shy of 50 American states (47 to be exact), and is curious about the world around her, bringing these human connections and different cultures into her daily life. Her home base is the Bay Area, California, but you'll often find her away in some other place. But always down to call into a Zoom meeting from wherever in the world she is.

Hong-My Basrai

Hong-My Basrai resides in Los Angeles County and is the author of Behind the Red Curtain: a Memoir (Los Nietos Press, 2020). She has been active with PIVOT since its formation in 2017. During the crucial 2020 Presidential Election, she served as translation Lead and liaison for several activist groups in need of language support, including Viet Fact Check. 

Currently, Hong-My also sits on the Board of Directors of Inlandia Institute, a literary center and a nonprofit organization for the Arts, serving the greater Inland Empire since 2007. She is also an active member of the Writers' Club of Whittier and was formerly its president.

Born and raised in Saigon, Vietnam, Hong-My Basrai (née Lê Thị) is fluent in Vietnamese and French. Transplanted at age twenty-two to Southern California, she picked up enough English to survive her college years. She has continuously improvised upon the borrowed language to make it her very own. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering. 

Her multifaceted identity is her strongest strength. Born in privilege, she grew up to experience poverty and persecution in fallen Saigon. Her first few years as an immigrant in America sharpened her survival skills, and at the same time deepened her awareness of inequalities, and the misfortune of the have-nots, mired in the vicious cycle of poverty in precarious living conditions, and lack of language and politicial power. Hong-My then realized that her love of languages could be used, not only to express herself in the new society through literary endeavors, but also to help others through activism, to demand greater justice and representation for people of color, particularly VietAm from all backgrounds and educational levels.

Cathy Lam

Cathy is currently the Treasurer of PIVOT and is co-chair of the Finance/Fundraising Committee. Originally from from Southern California and currently resides in Hilo, Hawaii.

She has a long history of work with the Vietnamese American communities, including leadership positions with Vietnamese American Non-Governmental Organization Network (VANGO Network) and Viet Rainbow of Orange County (VROC). She has been a parent advisor for VROC since its inception in 2013 in response to the discrimination faced by LGBTQ+ people during the Lunar Tet Parade.

Cathy Lam founded Our1World that works with youth and community development in Vietnam on leadership in environmental issues, adolescent and reproductive health. She has development work in Habitat Restoration in Central Vietnam Phong Dien with native Mellaleuca Cajeputi tea tree and in Hue with Forest Restoration of endangered plants.

She was formerly a board member at Newport Bay Conservancy. Along with her husband Mike Kane, they are both key stakeholders/co-founders of Electrical Vehicle movement (now Plug In America) in the early 2000's, working with CA Air Quality Management Board and the automobile industry to manufacture zero emission vehicles. She has 2 wonderful loving LGBT children . She holds a Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from UC Irvine. She loves to dance for exercise, to hike, swim and garden in her spare time.

Nick Nguyen

Nick Nguyen was born in Pennsylvania in 1976 and grew up in Ohio, his parents refugees from South Vietnam who fled the persecution of the Communist North Vietnamese regime in the year before. After attending college at Ohio State, he spent time in Austin, TX, and Detroit, MI before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005. After 20 years in the technology industry as a software engineer, startup co-founder, product manager, and executive, his most recent career change was in 2019 when he decided to shift to becoming a full time parent.

Like many Vietnamese Americans, he grew up with conservative politics, and grew more progressive as his education and career progressed and exposed him to more systems and peoples all over the world. As a person who is deeply invested in the potential of technology to change lives, his interest in joining the PIVOT board is closely tied to fighting the rampant misinformation that affects his community of Vietnamese Americans. As Research Lead and a writer on Viet Fact Check, he aspires to inform and protect the Vietnamese American community from the damage that misinformation causes.

He lives in Palo Alto, CA with his wife, two children, and a Boston Terrier.