Celebrating Five Years of PIVOT

February 2022 is the fifth anniversary of the founding of PIVOT. In December 2016, following Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. Presidential Election, a group of Vietnamese Americans met in Virginia to plan how we can stop what we correctly anticipated was a corrupt administration that was a threat to American democracy and minority populations. Other meetings followed in January 2017 in northern and southern California. We discovered that many Vietnamese American organizations were doing great things within their local region and in Viet Nam. However, there was no effective national organization for progressive Vietnamese Americans interested in working on politics in the United States. 

On February 1st, 2017, this loose knit group of Vietnamese Americans created a listserv and after some debate, named ourselves “PIVOT-The Progressive Vietnamese American Organization.” Two weeks later we had a logo and a website. We agreed on a mission statement “to engage and empower Vietnamese Americans for a just and diverse America.” PIVOT’s vision is to be a collective voice for progressive Vietnamese Americans, to engage and empower Vietnamese Americans through civic engagement and leadership development, and to support policies and candidates that are aligned with our values. Having a mission and a vision that we all agreed on was important to build a sustainable organization that went beyond fighting the Trump administration. On February 21st, 2017, we submitted our application to be a 501c4 non-profit corporation.

For those involved in the creation of PIVOT, those were crazy and scary days. Most of us had never been active politically in any space. Those who were active had avoided Vietnamese American politics.  For many of us, “politics” was a word to avoid because it brought back the experience of the war in Viet Nam and the conflicts in Vietnamese American communities as we grappled with the trauma of being refugees and of resettlement. Yet, most of us had been thinking about how we can work for justice, equality, and diversity and many of us had been doing that work in various arenas. It disturbed us that we were not doing it with the Vietnamese American communities that we came from and were an integral part of.  

The narrative was that Vietnamese Americans were conservative and pro-Republican. This did not reflect the reality that those who started PIVOT saw nor the data. In 2012, 61% of Vietnamese Americans voted for Barack Obama while only 39% voted for Mitt Romney. In 2016, 61% voted for Hilary Clinton while only 34% voted for Donald Trump. In 2020, only 38% of Vietnamese Americans identified as Republican, while 34% were independent and 27% Democrats. One of the most gratifying things that we learned from so many Vietnamese Americans when they heard about PIVOT was that they were surprised to find that they were not alone.

Within months of our founding, we helped Kathy Tran to get elected to the Virginia House of Delegates as the first Vietnamese American legislator in the state. In 2018, we helped to turn Orange County, CA blue in the congressional election. 

In 2020, we succeeded in our goal to remove Donald Trump from office and helped to elect President Joe Biden. Focusing our strategy on swing states, we mailed nearly 50,000 flyers and sent over 35,000 texts to Vietnamese American voters. Our digital advertisements reached over 500,000 viewers. We funded 11 PIVOT Fellows and Interns who worked with local partners to make over 2 million voter contacts.

We also identified misinformation as a major problem within the Vietnamese American community and launched VietFactCheck to provide accurate information in English and Vietnamese. This effort has been recognized not only by Vietnamese Americans but also in the mainstream media such as the Los Angeles Times and Last Week Tonight by John Oliver. VietFactCheck has also helped to remove several sources of disinformation aimed at Vietnamese Americans from YouTube. 

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, PIVOT launched a bilingual VietCOVID website to provide resources to help Vietnamese Americans have accurate information about COVID-19 and where to get access to testing and vaccination. VietCOVID has received funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Walmart Foundation.

In 2021, the California Asian Pacific Islanders Legislative Caucus gave PIVOT an award for Excellence in Civic Engagement. With the resilience and resourcefulness of refugees, PIVOT has achieved much due to the effort of mostly volunteers. We have an ever growing membership to represent all walks of life from all over the United States who are actively engaged. To launch PIVOT into the next phase of building capacity for Vietnamese American empowerment, we are hiring our first Executive Director who will help us to consolidate and expand. We ask you to support us to engage and empower Vietnamese Americans for a just and diverse America. Join us to work for the changes we want to see and to build this great nation.