Minh Kauffman, an innovator in international educational exchange and community development, was born Nguyen Thi Minh in Hanoi and raised in Saigon. She journeyed to Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana in 1969, her personal path of international education. Following graduation, Kauffman taught second grade for two years. In 1976, she and her husband Fred Kauffman began a 13-year series of international service assignments through Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). In 1990, the Kauffmans created the Education Exchange Center (CEEVN) as a project of the MCC Vietnam program, to strengthen linkages between Vietnamese and American scholars and academic institutions at a time when Vietnam was isolated, and the U.S. trade embargo made contact challenging. CEEVN became an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) subsidiary in 1994. Under her leadership, CEEVN began managing the Fulbright Fellowships for Vietnamese scholars and later added the Vietnam portion of the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program (2000-13). From 1992-2009, she facilitated many other Ford-funded programs. Starting in 2006, Minh partnered with StFX’s Coady Institute, a collaboration that included co-creating social justice fora to bring CEEVN alumni cohorts together to work for the betterment of Vietnamese society. Under Kauffman’s leadership, ACLS-CEEVN managed over $45 million in grants and funded nearly 2,000 fellowships, study tours, and grants to Vietnamese scholars and organizations. She’s received the 2005 Friendship Medal from Vietnamese President Tran Duc Luong and has been called “the most important person involved in the creation of meaningful relations between Vietnam and the United States.” Believing CEEVN’s mission complete, Kauffman retired and closed its offices in 2020. She’d worked the previous years with CEEVN alumni, creating the Stronger Together Center that will preserve and grow its legacy. The Excellent Bridge, published by ACLS in 2020, recounts CEEVN’s history. Fred Kauffman passed away in 2019. Minh Kauffman lives in both Philadelphia, with son Timothy, and in Nashville, with son Tony and daughter-in-law Nadia.
