AAA-Fund Advisory Board Members (as of September 1, 2007) Asian American Action Fund (AAA-Fund) 700 H Street, NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20001 email: info@aaa-fund.org phone: 202-236-2048 For more information about the AAA-Fund, visit our website at: www.aaa-fund.org Copyright (c) AAA-Fund 2000-2007, All rights reserved. =========================== FULL BIO INFORMATION BELOW =========================== Richard Chang Toby Chaudhuri Kahan S. Dhillon, Jr. Jocelyn Hong Betsy Kim Nasim G. Memon Erika Moritsugu Alexander Nguyen =========================== Richard Chang Advisory Board Member Mr. Chang is a partner at the law firm of Wasserman, Mancini & Chang, an "AV" rated firm that is also one of the oldest immigration law firms in the country. He received his Juris Doctorate (JD) and his International Law certificate at the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a Bachelors degree in History - East Asian Concentration. Richard W. Chang was one of the authors of the Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC) Cultural Center Proposal at UIUC that helped the Asian Pacific American (APA) student groups land a $30,000 grant for APA programs and served as a template for the newly opened Asian American Cultural Center. He is a contributing author for the Taiwan-AIT article in "The Visa Processing Guide" published by the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). =========================== Toby Chaudhuri Advisory Board Member Toby Chaudhuri directs communications at the Campaign for America's Future's Washington headquarters. He works with progressive organizations, political campaigns and people in public office to develop messages and strategies to communicate with the public and influence public policy. A member of Generation X, Chaudhuri arrived at college a decade ago disillusioned, doubting politics could make a difference. He studied political science and economics and completed research later used by U.S. Senators to protect sick and hungry children from right-wing budget cuts. As a result, Chaudhuri became involved in local and statewide political campaigns, realizing in his work that he could make a difference. Since then, Chaudhuri has managed more than $30 million total in state and federal campaigns and has worked at the helm of national media operations. He fought corruption to enact historical campaign finance reforms directing strategic communications at Common Cause; took on corporate polluters to provide safe drinking water and clean air as a political appointee to President Clinton; and worked to elect several principled state and federal candidates including serving as deputy press secretary to Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign. Before joining the Campaign for America's Future, Chaudhuri worked hard to protect children as Marian Wright Edelman's spokesman and media strategist at the Children's Defense Fund. Chaudhuri also worked hard to promote multicultural civic engagement leading a campaign to turn out tens of thousands of Massachusetts Asian American voters in the 2002 midterm election. The program he developed was adapted to engage over 1.5-million South Asian American voters across the country for the 2004 elections. =========================== Kahan S. Dhillon, Jr. Advisory Board Member At the age of 15 Kahan S. Dhillon, Jr. became one of the youngest interns in the history of the US Congress working both in the US House of Representatives and Senate. At 19 while still in college, he co-founded EFM, Inc. an IT firm specializing in Human Resources Enterprise Systems. EFM, Inc. through its online employment portal became one of the early pioneers of the online “real time recruiting” market. In 2003, Mr. Dhillon formed Regent Company, LLC a diversified Real Estate Investment Firm which achieved multi-million dollar revenues in only its first year and half of existence. Mr. Dhillon currently serves on numerous Boards of Directors and Advisory Boards for groups such as Kiwanis International. He sits on the campaign finance committee of several Congressional members, is a co-founder of the US Sikh Chamber of Commerce, and was recently elected the President of the Mount Vernon-Lee (Virginia) Chamber of Commerce. =========================== Jocelyn Hong Advisory Board Member Ms. Hong is a Principal in the Twenty-First Century Group, Inc., a Washington, D.C. based, lobbying firm. She has extensive legislative experience, and was instrumental in the passage of a landmark federal law to clean up radioactive materials, which passed in a record three days. She has also been successful in numerous projects, such as activating a Congressional Oversight Committee to initiate a controversial General Accounting Office inquiry resulting in a strong report and obtaining several policy initiatives in appropriations bills; and obtaining both an authorization and an appropriation for a flood control project in the same calendar year. Ms. Hong was part of President Clinton's 1992 presidential transition team. Previously, she was a legislative aide to U.S. Senator John Glenn and Congressman Dennis E. Eckart. She has also worked on several Democratic Presidential and Congressional campaigns. Born and raised in Honolulu, she has cultivated her leadership and management abilities as a leader in several national charitable organizations representing Asian American and women's interests. In addition to being a founding board member of the AAA-Fund, she was a spokesperson for a coalition of Korean merchants victimized by violent crime in the nation's capital, a board member of the Washington Coalition on Comfort Women Issues (WCCW) and a founding board member of the Korean American Coalition, Washington, D.C. Chapter (KACDC). =========================== Betsy Kim Advisory Board Member Elizabeth (Betsy) Kim is Deputy Director of the American Majority Partnership, a department at the Democratic National Committee focused on issues-based outreach to the Democratic Party's core constituencies. Ms. Kim has over ten years of political experience, including coordination of Asian American Pacific Islander GOTV efforts at national and state levels through three presidential election cycles. Ms. Kim served as a political appointee under the Clinton Administration, where she was Counselor to the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration. During her tenure at the SBA, she was appointed to oversee SBA's implementation of President Clinton's New Market Initiative, a sweeping program designed to bring access to capital to women and minority-owned businesses in America's urban and rural communities. Ms. Kim has been actively involved in the Asian American community. She is a former Board Member of the Asian American Action Fund, former Chair of the D.C. Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs, and former President of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Greater Washington, DC. Prior to her service in the public sector, Ms. Kim practiced bankruptcy law at firms in Washington, DC and Phoenix, AZ. Originally from Honolulu, HI, she received her J.D. from the University of Arizona College of Law, and her B.A. from Pomona College. =========================== Nasim G. Memon Advisory Board Member Ms. Memon, who is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has extensive experience as a fundraiser and community leader in the Indian American, South Asian, and APA communities. She also has been very active with the Women's Leadership Forum of the Democratic National Committee and a Steering Committee Member for major Democratic Party events. Ms. Memon currently serves as a National Executive Board member for the Indian American Forum for Political Education (IAFPE). During her years in Washington, she was an active member of the Virginia Democratic Committee, a Board Member of VANARAL, and an Advisory Board Member for the Center for Multicultural Human Services (CMHS), a group dedicated to serving the mental health, social, and educational needs of new Americans and the international community in Metro D.C. Ms. Memon has an M.S. in Biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University and a B.S. from Northeastern University. She was included in "Who's Who Among Students in American Colleges and Universities" when she was President of Northeastern's International Student Forum. She currently serves as a Senior IP Specialist in the Biotechnical Patent Prosecution Team at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., located in Cambridge, MA. =========================== Erika Moritsugu Advisory Board Member and former E.D. Erika Moritsugu was an attorney at Hogan & Hartson, with a practice focused on customs and international trade policy and litigation. Previously, Erika was a principal at The Wexler Group, a D.C.-based government relations firm, where she specialized in the coordination of grassroots campaigns and coalition management. She has also interned at the White House in 1995, and served as a legislative assistant at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service, clerked at a leading law firm in Honolulu, Hawai'i and the Prosecutor's Office of the City and County of Honolulu, and interned with the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Erika is actively involved with numerous national and local community service and political organizations. Through the DNC's Democratic Lawyers' Council and other civic organizations, she advocates for election law reform and voting rights. In 2004 the Tahirih Justice Center recognized her for her pro bono work on behalf of individuals seeking political asylum in the United States. Additionally, she volunteers as counselor to victims of rape and domestic violence for the Victim Assistance Network in Fairfax County, Virginia. =========================== Alexander Nguyen Advisory Board Member and former E.D. Alexander Nguyen was a litigation attorney at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, where he was involved in a number of commercial litigation matters and also won asylum for clients, helped represent victims of hate crimes, and argued appellate criminal appeals. Alex was also a Public Interest Law Initiative Fellow at the Legal Assistance Foundation in Chicago, where he helped represent low-income clients in bankruptcy, consumer law, fraud, and predatory lending cases, and assisted asylum clients in criminal deportation hearings. He has also worked at the Brennan Center for Justice helping with access-to-justice litigation and worked on the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, and was a recipient of the ABA Legal Opportunity Scholarship for minorities. He was selected as a Public Policy and International Affairs fellow at Woodrow Wilson school in 1998. He has been a reporter-researcher at The New Republic, and a writing fellow at the American Prospect. His writing has appeared in many publications, including the UTNE Reader, The Hartford Courant, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and The Washington Monthly. He was the winner of the 2000 National Award for Education Reporting and co-founder of In The Fray magazine, an on-line magazine dedicated to issues of diversity, identity, and community (www.inthefray.com). He holds an A.B. from Harvard University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, and is a current board member of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association's Asian Educational Fund.