Nhà Chống Lũ started in November 2013 on 200 million đồng of donated money.1

The interesting number is 150, the ceiling Sống Foundation put on its own build programme for 2019 while donors were offering more.2

The programme raises money to put flood-resilient homes under families in the provinces that take the worst of Vietnam’s storm season. It has eleven approved house designs, and by mid-2020 it had raised over 50 billion đồng and built close to 800 houses.3

Every one of those houses was at least half paid for by the family living in it.

Phạm Thị Hương Giang, who works as Jang Kều, calls the method the three cos: co-design, co-financing, co-construction. “Families actively design their homes and contribute at least 50 percent of the total cost, whether in cash, materials, or labour.”

Walk the unit. By late 2018 the programme had mobilised roughly 30 billion đồng and had 700 completed houses standing against it, which puts donor money at somewhere near 43 million đồng a house.

The model says the household matched it or better. Cash where there was cash, and where there was none, timber and cement, or the weeks the family’s own men spent on the build.

Co-design carries weight of its own. The family picks and adapts its house from the eleven approved designs, and a home a family drew is a home it will finish paying for.

So the pool of donor money bought about twice the housing it could have bought alone, and the second half arrived as materials and labour that never passed through a bank account.

That is the mechanism. The discipline underneath it is the part worth the longer walk.

The 50 percent is a wall, and the programme treats it as one. When a household is hit by something outside its control and cannot raise its half, Sống Foundation does not top up the difference and does not lower the bar.

It waits.

“If force majeure prevents a family from meeting their share, we remain patient and offer support until they can, rather than increasing our funding or altering the framework.”

If we compromise the model once, exceptions compound, and scaling becomes impossible.

“If we compromise the model once, exceptions compound, and scaling becomes impossible.”

The cost of that discipline is paid in throughput, and it is visible in the accounts. Money sits raised while a family finds its share, and a programme that could sign more houses this quarter signs fewer.

Which is what the 150-house cap in 2019 was buying. Sống Foundation was five years past its first pilot, freshly licensed as a foundation in November 2018, and choosing to build at the pace the households could match rather than the pace the donors could fund.1

To see where the wall comes from, price the one Jang Kều did not have.

The agreement was that I would build the Vietnam market and receive 50 percent of the profit.

In the mid-2000s she was two years into running a foreign flavour and fragrance house’s Vietnam business, Ho Chi Minh City open, Hanoi open, Bangkok on the drawing board. “The agreement was that I would build the Vietnam market and receive 50 percent of the profit.”2

The agreement was a promise, not a structure. “Once the market became successful, the owner replaced me with a salaried director so they could keep all the profits.”

Families actively design their homes and contribute at least 50 percent of the total cost, whether in cash, materials, or labour.

Labour law at the time gave her nothing to stand on, and she started again from zero. The lesson she took was structural: operate as an independent principal under a business cooperation agreement, because a share that exists only as a promise reprices to zero at the exact moment it becomes worth collecting.

Twenty years later her foundation runs on a 50 percent share as well, and this one cannot be reassigned, because it is poured into the concrete. A family’s half stands in the piles under its own floor and in the weeks it spent on the build, a stake no later signature can take back.

The sequencing of the foundation itself follows the same habit. She had wanted it since a UNDP environmental project early in her career, and spent the decade first building a distribution company, the G’Brand agency and a Singapore holding structure.4

“I knew I had to build my own financial strength and network first.”

Then the 2013 pilot, five years of testing the model in the flood provinces, the licence in November 2018, and only after that a second programme, the tree-planting Hạnh Phúc Xanh.2

A subsidy that closes the gap once has repriced every house behind it, the same way a discount granted to one distributor reprices the book. She learned that pricing rule as a distributor, and the foundation inherited it intact.

The transferable part is the order of operations. The contribution is set before the fundraising, so the shortfall lands on the calendar rather than on the model.

A programme that funds the gap grows until the gap does. One that waits for it grows at the speed of the people it is building for, which turns out to be close to 800 houses in seven years.

Footnotes

  1. Nhà Chống Lũ was founded in November 2013 with VNĐ200 million. By late 2018 it had housed 700 families and benefited some 3,500 people across eight provinces, and Sống Foundation received its operating licence on 7 November 2018. ↩ ↩2

  2. Interview conducted for CÈ by the CÈ AI interviewer, 19 August 2026; quotes lightly normalised for print, wording untouched, transcripts on file. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. The eleven-design figure and the 2019 cap come from Sống Foundation’s own account of the programme; the fundraising and house totals are as reported in mid-2020. ↩

  4. G’Brand was founded in 2007 and GroupG Asia Pacific in Singapore in 2012, both before Sống Foundation began in 2013. ↩