Dr. Truong Nong is an educator, an adjunct professor, an author, and a community activist with more than 25 years of experience. He also serves as a leadership trainer in the past ten years. In the past 25 years, Dr. Nong has been involved in community building, working with youth groups as a counselor and leadership trainer. Being a high school teacher for 14 years at DeBakey High School for Health Professions, Dr. Nong knows firsthand the impact of education. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, a Master’s of Arts in Political Science, and a Ph.D in Education in 2012. Dr. Nong has been teaching Vietnamese language and Vietnamese Studies at the University of Houston in the past 5 years. He has spoken at several conferences on the topic of “Civil Society”, “Vietnam war” and translated 3 books into Vietnamese: “Politics” by Aristotle, “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine, and “The second treatise of Government” by John Locke.
In 1990, he was one of the founders of the Vietnamese American Youth Organization (VAYO) in Houston, TX. Currently, he serves as Advisory Board Member of the Vietnamese Culture and Science Association (VCSA), a national Vietnamese American organization based in Houston, Texas. In this capacity, he has designed and delivered a number of workshops in leadership development for VCSA’s annual youth leadership camps for the past ten years, as well as designed and taught Vietnamese history and literature courses for the past twelve years. He also served on the first Advisory Board of Sun Flower Missions, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of people in Vietnam through educational assistance programs.
In 2005, he left his teaching position at Michael DeBakey High School to pursue his dream: to establish the Institute for Civic Education in Vietnam (www.icevn.org), a non-profit organization. ICEVN’s mission is to promote social responsibilities and transparency in Vietnam by providing civic education, entrepreneurship education, and managerial leadership development in Vietnam. ICEVN provides on-line educational classes on civic education, business management and leadership development, and aims to build an on-line library of approximately 100 translated books in humanity and social sciences to share the knowledge to the people in Vietnam.
In 2016, he was honored by the Asian Heritage Society of San Diego, California with the Global Outreach Award for his work with the Institute of Civic Education in Vietnam that reached out to the audience in 140 countries around the globe.