She Survived Pirates at Sea. Now She Helps Vietnamese Families Break Cycles of Harm.

ICAN staff and volunteers

Photo courtesy of the International Children Assistance Network (ican2.org)

Quyen Vuong was 16 when she fled Vietnam by boat in 1981, surviving pirate encounters at sea before reaching the United States. She went on to earn a degree from Yale and an MBA from Stanford — but a Fulbright placement in a Vietnamese refugee camp redirected her path toward nonprofit work.

In 2000, Vuong co-founded the International Children Assistance Network (ICAN) in California’s Santa Clara County, home to the largest Vietnamese population outside Vietnam. The organization offers culturally sensitive, evidence-based parenting classes and child-abuse-prevention programs, and has secured funding from cities, counties, and foundations for mental-health services and domestic- and gender-based-violence prevention aimed at Vietnamese and other Asian American families.

More than two decades later, ICAN continues that work, helping families in the community Vuong now calls home build safer, healthier homes of their own.