Making a Difference: My Lan Tran's mission is in the workplace

It must be her karma, My Lan Tran says.

She has spent her life in workforce development, helping the poor, the disadvantaged, the immigrants to America.

"God gave me a mission. I just do it," said Tran, the executive director of the Virginia Asian Chamber of Commerce. "You have to finish your work. It's karma."

The Virginia Asian Chamber is part business and part community organization, said Tran. "We're aspiring to be a gateway of American economic opportunity for all Asian-Americans," the 55-year-old Vietnam native said. "We are building a community."

And "community means issues, concerns, vision, needs, fears and dreams," said Tran, a political refugee herself. "They wonder. They have questions."

"Our job here is to fill the gaps of knowledge," she said, between the members' traditional ways of doing business and American ones.

In 2004, Tran met Kajal B. Kapur at a Virginia Commonwealth University business seminar. "'You should get in touch with me,'" Kapur remembers Tran telling her. "'I can help you with a lot of the questions small businesses face.'"

Kapur, owner of Kapur Energy and Environmental Consulting in Charlottesville, didn't know about the myriad programs aimed at helping small businesses such as hers gain entry to the marketplace. "My Lan was very helpful in making me aware that I could actually make use of those," Kapur said.

Tinh Duc Phan, the chamber's founder and chairman, has known Tran since 1998, and in 2007, "we saw the community needs to have representation," said Phan. "I said, 'Would you help me to start up something?' She was all for it."

Even while working her regular job, Tran would take on chamber-related tasks that would keep her hands full till midnight or early morning, Phan said, and that was an everyday — including lunch times and weekends — pattern.

Tran even took vacation time from her regular job to handle tasks for the Asian Chamber, Phan said. In effect, he said, Tran was a full-time volunteer for the chamber in addition to working at her day job as a program manager with the Richmond city government.

After doing the executive-director job as a volunteer since 2007, the Asian Chamber hired Tran, who lives in Henrico County, as its first full-time executive this June.

"The demand for service has astronomically increased," said Phan, with members needing help with difficulties ranging from English language interpretation to starting up a new business.

Tran also developed the Richmond-based group's website. "We didn't spend a dime for those," Phan said. Even now, he said, "she's doing the work of two people of the same caliber."

A cyclone of energy, Tran throws herself into the organization's affairs, arranging programs, meeting with members, directing interns, wheeling and dealing.

"On the weekends, I don't just stay home," she said. "I've got to meet them in homes."

On those visits to fledgling entrepreneurs and community members, conversations range beyond business to concerns such as health-care and immigration issues.

"How can I know about these things if I don't work nights and weekends?" she asks. And, Tran said, "We never say this is only for Asians — no, no, no, no, no."

"My Lan is a bundle of energy, and she's a bundle of ideas too," said Kapur. "She is just very vibrant and full of ideas about how to set up programs for small businesses and how to help them."

Tran came to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1975 when the communists took over her country. "We left April 29," she said, flown out on a crowded U.S. military airplane. The next day, "the tanks started to roll into downtown."

After college and graduate school in the U.S., Tran worked as deputy director for a state employment department in Massachusetts before coming to Virginia in 1996, "looking for a new life and new opportunities."

Tran spent six years with the Virginia Economic Development Partnership as an international trade marketing manager and policy analyst. She speaks Spanish, French, Vietnamese and English, and she is learning Chinese.

Today the Virginia Asian Chamber — which aims to maximize the economic potential of the state's Asian-Pacific American businesses — has about 300 members and conducts nearly 30 programs, seminars and conferences a year.

Pointing to Tran and her efforts for the group, Phan said, "All the success is due to that hard-working person."