Tram Nguyen is an award-winning activist and community leader who helped found New Virginia Majority in 2007, where she currently serves as co-executive director. She leads multi-racial, multi-issue campaigns using large-scale civic engagement, community organizing, advocacy, leadership development, and strategic communications. Her work on democracy, criminal justice, immigrants’ rights, climate change, and economic opportunity explores the intersections of social, racial, and economic justice.
Under her leadership, New Virginia Majority has expanded the electorate in Virginia to be more reflective of the commonwealth’s rich diversity by registering over 300,000 new voters and knocking on over four million doors to get people of color and young people to the polls. As a result, Black and brown voters have turned out in record numbers, contributing to a new Virginia that gives voice to the most underrepresented communities. Working with key partners, she anchors several progressive initiatives throughout the state that have had significant victories for Virginia’s more vulnerable populations.
Prior to joining New Virginia Majority, Tram organized and advocated on behalf of survivors of some of the country’s most devastating disasters – both natural and man-made. As a project coordinator for the World Trade Center Rescue and Recovery Program at Mount Sinai Medical Center, she helped secure federal funding for a health treatment program to address the unmet physical and mental health needs of rescue and recovery workers at Ground Zero. As the director of Boat People SOS’ emergency preparedness and response efforts, Tram organized tens of thousands of Vietnamese immigrants throughout the Gulf Coast whose lives were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. She managed a multi-state program in LA, MS, AL, and TX that provided cultural and language-appropriate services and empowered immigrant families to self-advocate for the sustainable redevelopment of their communities and businesses. She worked with then-Congressman Mike Honda and Congressman Al Green to successfully amend the Robert T. Stafford Act to include language access.
Tram currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Meyer Foundation and on the National Advisory Council for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. She is a certificate faculty member at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Tram is an alumna of Barnard College and a former Lead the Way Fellow of the NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.