Kathy Le was born in April of 1975 amidst the fall of Saigon in Vietnam. In 1980 she and her pregnant mother fled Vietnam, joining the hundreds of thousands of desperate boat people who fled the country in the years after the war. After a brief stay in a refugee camp in Singapore where her brother was born, Kathy and her family emigrated to the US where she grew up in Southern California. She came to Brown in 1993, where in her junior year she became a research assistant for the Vietnam War Critical Oral History Project at the Watson Institute for International Studies. Kathy graduated in 1997 with a joint degree in English Literature and International Relations. After earning her Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, Kathy devoted her career to nonprofit work, both international and domestic. She has held leadership positions at Pathfinder International, the International Institute of New England, and Primary Progress.
Kathy is currently the Executive Director of Community Action Partners, an organization that works with Harvard Business and Kennedy School alumni to provide pro bono strategic consulting to Boston area nonprofits. She serves on the board of Arlington EATS, a food security organization.