Dr. Nguyen Dinh Thang Chief Executive Officer and President, Boat People SOS Falls Church, VA

Dr. Nguyen Dinh Thang first joined Boat People SOS (BPSOS) in 1988 as a volunteer. In 1995 he launched an advocacy campaign that resulted in the resettlement of over 18,000 former boat people from Vietnam to the United States. In 1997, Dr. Thang initiated a long-term effort to build capacity for the Vietnamese American community. He has since built BPSOS from a small, all-volunteer organization into the largest Vietnamese American non-profit organization. BPSOS has operations in half a dozen locations in the United States and a regional headquarters in Southeast Asia and has a vast Vietnamese-language media network. Simultaneously, Dr. Thang has mentored over 50 faith-based and community-based organizations and secured $4 million to support their work.

Since 1989, Dr. Thang has testified before Congress on human rights issues, most recently in 2018, where he raised awareness of Vietnam’s imprisonment of 170 religious and political prisoners of conscience. For the past two decades, Dr. Thang has launched many national and international initiatives, including Legal Assistance for Vietnamese Asylum Seekers and Center for Asylum Protection, that provide legal aid to refugees and asylum seekers in the first asylum countries; Coalition to Abolish Modern-day Slavery in Asia, which has rescued or assisted in the rescue of 11,000 victims of sex and labor trafficking in 20 countries; the Disaster Relief and Restore Program, which has helped tens of thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina (2005), the BP Oil Spill (2010), and Hurricane Harvey (2017), among others; the Renewing Democracy Fund, which trains young leaders and encourages Vietnamese American participation in American politics. Dr. Thang has received numerous awards for his contributions to the United States, refugee populations, and global human rights.