Serica Non-Profit Salon 2026

Come learn about some of the amazing work our AAPI nonprofit partners are doing across the country!

Speakers:

Eddy Zhang | President & Founder, New Breath Foundation

Eddy Zheng (he/him) has been bridging communities for decades, particularly Black, Asian American, formerly incarcerated, immigrant, and refugee groups. Eddy spent over 20 years in California state prisons and immigration jails. During his incarceration, he earned his college degree, mentored youth, and reformed in-prison programming to make it more transformative and culturally relevant. His awards and fellowships include the Galaxy Gives Galaxy Leader Fellow (2026), the Open Society Soros Justice Fellow (2015), the Leading Edge Fellow (2019), and the Frederick Douglass 200 awardee (2019). Eddy has been featured in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inside Philanthropy, the New Yorker, PBS, NPR, the Guardian, SXSW, and at many more events and media outlets.

Learn more at www.new-breath.org

Ngoc-Tran Vu | Lead Artist & Project Director, 1975: A Vietnamese Diaspora Memorial

Ngoc-Tran Vu is a storyteller, connector, and interpreter. Her work evokes themes of familial ties, memories, and rituals as they relate to issues of social justice and intersectionality. As a 1.5-generation Vietnamese American interdisciplinary artist and organizer, she is passionate about creating spaces and platforms for cross-cultural storytelling and critical discourse that challenge inequity. Her experiences as a person of color working with communities inside and beyond the United States have informed her artistic framing of realities, visions and possibilities. Her deepest influences include her family and friends as well as fellow artists and change-makers from the past and present.

As a creative committed to communities and social justice, she is an effective lead artist in trust-based partnerships. She is driven to co-create, support and protect the stories and voices of communities of color, refugees and immigrants. Through active participation and holistic facilitation, she aims to offer new modes of resistance to interrogate and counteract the dominant narrative. She is particularly invested in the intersections of storytelling, cultures, and activism, and spotlighting those who are willing to step out of bounds to advance social change. In her own healing journey, she continuously exploring and unpacking themes of identity, justice, belonging, and power. The arts serve as portals of re-imaginations which are pivotal to challenge the status quo. She embraces her responsibility to facilitate work that contributes positively to her local and global community.

My mind is pondering

    My heart is Vietnamese

        My soul is an artist

               My spirit is a healer

Learn more at https://www.tranvuarts.com/