Mai Chi

A Better Vietnam

A Better Vietnam (ABVN) was founded in 2017 with the ambition of bringing a better future to Vietnamese Youth, especially students, by providing them the opportunity to practice English for free with volunteer native English speakers through online one-on-one lessons. We believe "Better English – Better Future". For the first 2 years, we operated on a shoestring, without any funding but also without any real expenses. The volunteer teachers – mostly in their home countries - will conduct the online lessons with the students through Google Hangout at the arranged time indicated on the shared Google spreadsheet. The students are selected from an application round and then a 15-min interview to become ABVN's students. We also organized to take the volunteer teachers to two English centers in rural part of Da Nang and Hue, when they are visiting Vietnam. After two years we have provided more than 3,000 lessons, with 10 volunteer teachers from Australia and the US. 200 students get to study with us and they all appreciate this opportunity and build a strong relationship with our teachers. The turning point for A Better Vietnam has been receiving the grant from YSEALI Seeds for future in March 2020. With this grant, we are able to build up this website and communicate the project widely to recruit more volunteer teachers and thus help more students. Our plan in the future is develop the project into a social enterprise. A Better Vietnam is bringing opportunities to hundreds, and in the future, thousands of students to practice English for free. For the team members, ABVN is meaningful because we can help bring a brighter future to people in our region. For the teachers, it is a great platform to give back to the community and also to be inspired by energetic young people.