Director Mrs Huong and Vice Director Mrs Hong and volunteers

The Hope Center was started by two friends, Nguyễn Thị Hồng and Lê Thị Hương who have known each other for many years. They attended college, worked together and even started a general shop which provided a large variety of services such as laundry cleaners, catering and wedding events management.

The two friends made a name for themselves and built up a network of contacts that would become truly important to them in The Hope Center venture later on. As part of this network they also worked with the government’s labour department. During their contact with this department one point that struck them was how inefficient vocational training was being managed during this time.

Government officials noticed their interest and suggested that they might want to give it a try and open a vocational training Center themselves. The two friends rose to the challenge and decided that this new vocational training Center should serve disabled and disadvantaged people.

In 1999 these two dynamic women encouraged an initial group of 18 students to start the Center with. This was not as easy a task as one might imagine. Both Mrs Hồng and Mrs Hương had to spend many days personally visiting families in order to persuade them that offering their disabled family members a chance to learn a skill and become self-sufficient was most definitely within their ability and would enrich their lives.

Many prejudices in local society, as may be found in every other society in the world, created a perception that disabled people should be excluded from mainstream society. The Hope Center certainly proved this wrong with many success stories to their credit of disabled people learning new skills and carving out stable careers for themselves.