About CQF

Our mission is our personal life's mission: making our community a better place. Since we share a common Vietnamese cultural heritage, we want to delve deeper into this gift to discover its higher value and pass it to the next generation.

Cultural Quest means we are on the search for the higher values of our Viet culture. " Foundation" is simply wordplay, because the word "found" suggests we got something.

Our mission is in our motto: "tinh hoa xưa cho cuộc sống mới," which means "old wisdom for modern living."

Our existence is not about career, politics, or religion. It is about better citizenship—forward-looking, mindful about the past, and impactful in the community. We incorporated as a 501(c)3 non-profit to be credible and responsible. We are private people, who do not like to be known to the public. But we show our identities because we the public to know that we are real people who volunteer for real work.

Finally, we are a local neighborhood group in San Jose California. We meet in living rooms, garages, Coffee Lovers cafe shops and the Village Square Branch library. We know each others' children, and volunteer together in scouting, churches and temples. We mix serious subjects with silly stories, and we like to talk about solutions rather than griping about social problems.

We spend our own money for most things we do. Our budget is small and we have no paid staff. We are registered with the IRS, Franchise Tax Board, California Secretary of State and Office of the Attorney General.

Organizational Information:

Name: Cultural Quest Foundation, Inc.

Founded: 2008 by Brandon Hoang Nguyen

Employer Identification Number: 26-3561143

Secretary of State/FTB number: 3162600

IRS Tax-exempt status approval date: 10/20/2008

Mailing address: 1298 South Park Victoria #203, Milpitas CA 95035

Website: www.culturalquest.com

Email: support@culturalquest.com

We thank our donors for their financial support in 2025

Donor	Amount
Moonlight Humanity Foundation	$1000+
Christopher Hoang Pham	$100 +
Tara Dang	$500 +
H&T Foundation	$1000+
Quyen Vuong	$100 +
Douglas Minh Duong	$50 +
Law Office of Matthew Minh-Triet Vo	$500 +
Dong-Thu Lam	$100 +
Minh-Tuan Nguyen	$100 +
Doanh Nguyen	$50 +
Phuong Linh Tran	$100 +
Brandon Nguyen	$500 +

Our plan for 2025-26

"Người tính không bằng trời tính" - People's plan is no match to Heaven's plan-

Our club began with the goal of learning about herbal medicine from herbalist Hi-Chi Nguyễn, but social needs keep pulling us away from our goal. 2025 were to be the year we restart the Hi-Chi Herbal Project to share herbal knowledge with the wider community, but a rash of youth's suicide forced us to come up with a plan to help stop the problem. Hence, the BANYAN TREE Project was born.

The community does not need our projects because it has been doing just fine without us. We need to do these projects because we feel better with them in place in the community, and may be you will too! Join us if these works also make you feel good in making a difference.

Hi-Chi Herbal Project

2010-2021

Status: On hold

We compiled the knowledge-base of herbalist Hi-Chi Nguyễn who interpreted the ancient art of traditional Chinese herbal medicine into modern terms and demonstrated its efficacies.

We want to share much of these data on the web in the format of videos, forum and live discussion and maintain an herbal lab for members to use for their own health maintenance especially when dealing with a chronic illness.

We trained a handful of herbal practitioners and helped many to use safety natural herbs available in public. We stopped our project during the pandemic, and hope to kick off this project in Spring 2026.

The BANYAN TREE Family Growth Project

2025 - now

Status: Active, ongoing

Family problems do not necessarily lead to suicide, but family wellness positively prevents suicide. That is the social research finding that calls for all of us to improve our family life for the sake of the youth and everyone.

We must make direct family communication a normal and productive activity, and use the wisdom from the Viet culture as well as modern techniques to make it work.

The BANYAN TREE Project was developed this summer to bring youth and parents together to grow their family life. We hope to offer monthly sessions, online forums and private consultations to families using our 5-step family growth model. We want to train many cultural facilitators to help families with this task. We welcome you to join us.

Việt Tâm Support Group project

2018 - now

Status: Active, ongoing

Heeding the call from San Andreas Center to help the needs of Vietnamese parents caring for their disabled children, CQF headed short support group sessions with Thi Trần, the program manager, to make it into a permanent fixture of the service. Việt Tâm support group, uses the "process approach" of group psychotherapy, which emphasizes empathic listening and non-advice giving while making use of mindfulness and well-defined Vietnamese cultural concepts.

We are privileged to employ Việt Tâm model with ICAN and Ấn Tôn Meditation Center to serve and train more para-professional volunteers. However, the training process is more difficult than anticipated, and it will take more time to spread this skillset and make this service more widely available. You may be a support group facilitator-in-wait, ready to change lives. Join us!

Board of Directors

Credibility, Quality, Originality

Bear with us! We all have full-time jobs, and this CQF thing is only a labor of love on the side. But we take our volunteer work seriously because we believe it can have a significant impact on the community.

So far, we've made an itsy-bitsy dent in the community's social needs, too small to mention. We are hoping to deliver a bigger difference.