Ottawa (VNA) – The Canada-Vietnam Society (CVS) has become a vital bridge connecting the Vietnamese community in Canada, fostering people-to-people exchanges and strengthening friendship between the two countries, as heard at a ceremony to celebrate the society's 10th founding anniversary in Ottawa on July 12.
Established in 2016, the CVS aims to build a united Vietnamese community with a stronger voice in the host country, while promoting cooperation between Canada and Vietnam in the fields of culture, education, business and people-to-people interactions.
Nguyen Dai Trang, a member of the CVS’s executive board, said the organisation's greatest achievement over the past 10 years lies not only in the number of programmes it has organised but also in its success in bringing together Vietnamese associations across Canada, and fostering a shared voice within the community.
She said this unity has increasingly earned recognition from the Canadian authorities through a wide range of cooperative activities.
For many members, the society's greatest strength is its ability to connect Vietnamese people of different generations and from different parts of Canada, creating opportunities to preserve their cultural identity while maintaining close ties with the homeland, and expanding cooperation between the business communities in the two countries.
Over the past decade, the society has organised a wide range of cultural exchanges, business networking events, community support programmes and people-to-people activities. Among its signature initiatives is the Mid-Autumn Lantern Street Festival, which has attracted not only the Vietnamese community but also Canadian visitors, helping to introduce Vietnamese traditions in the Northern American country's multicultural environment.
Trang said one of the society’s priorities is to organise Vietnamese language classes for young people while introducing opportunities in Vietnam for study, employment, investment, entrepreneurship and tourism.
She stressed that preserving the Vietnamese language should go hand in hand with strengthening young people's connections with their ancestral homeland so they can better understand their roots and contribute to Vietnam's future development.
In the years ahead, the CVS will continue expanding cooperation with organisations, businesses and authorities in the two nations, while further promoting the role of the Vietnamese community in advancing people-to-people exchanges, thereby deepening the friendship and cooperation between Vietnam and Canada, Trang added./.
