In April of 1975 Green Cities Fund co-founder Tran Tuong Nhu (“Nhu”) responded to radio pleas for Vietnamese speaking interpreters needed as thousands of Vietnamese “orphans” arrived at The Presidio military base in San Francisco in the “Orphan Airlift” at the end of the Vietnam War.  Adoption agencies claimed the children needed to be “saved” from the war as the Saigon government collapsed.  

 Nhu soon discovered that many of the children were not orphans.   When the adoption agencies ignored Nhu and other Vietnamese volunteers’ warnings that the many of the children had families and may not be eligible for adoption they contacted local volunteer attorneys and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City, who filed the class action lawsuit, entitled Nguyen Da Yen v. Kissinger, to require the U.S. Government make an effort to reunite the children with their families.  Details of the class action lawsuit can be found here.

To this day Green Cities Fund has helped Vietnamese families find their children. In 2024 the named plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit, three siblings who grew up in an unhappy adoptive home, discovered their fourth sibling, whom they thought died in an Orphan Airlift plane crash they survived, was alive.  The entire family, including the parents who had come from Vietnam to find their children, was finally united after almost 50 years.

       Nhu served as consultant for a PBS American Experience documentary on one of the Orphan Airlift children, “Daughter from Danang“.  It won the documentary award at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar in 2002.