About Us

A Khmer Buddhist Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and operating the newly approved temple at Ruby and Norwood Avenues in San Jose, California.

The community we serve 

The Khmer community has known hardship throughout much of our history, many of us fleeing our homes from a war-ravaged country and seeking asylum in the U.S. for the promise of safety and peace. However, even here in the U.S., we have faced challenges and inequities, including higher poverty levels, lower rates of high school graduation and worse health outcomes as compared with other Asian American groups and the general population of Americans.

Our Founder and Executive Director 

A Khmer Buddhist Foundation was founded by Lyna Lam, who came to the Bay Area as a refugee following the Vietnam War and Cambodian genocide.

Lyna and her family of seven are ethnic Cambodians who escaped from Vietnam to Cambodia in 1979, when she was just nine years old, at the end of the Khmer Rouge regime. It took them nearly four years to reach the United States, including time spent in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines. “It was a very hard existence, with little food or water and a cramped and unsafe environment, but we know we were ultimately the lucky ones,” says Lyna of her journey. 

Once she and her family arrived in the U.S., her external conditions improved — she felt safer and had food — but it wasn’t easy to raise themselves from poverty as they integrated into a new society without money and where they didn’t speak the language. 

First they lived in a housing project in Pittsburg, California, a tough environment where they faced repeated crime and an uncertain future. But then a wonderful and generous person gave them a miracle that would change everything. A woman she worked for at the Housing Authority when she was 16 offered her a Section 8 voucher, which provides for a house rent subsidy. This changed their lives, giving them their first opportunity to climb out of poverty. Their new environment allowed her father, always resourceful and entrepreneurial, to start a landscaping business, which the entire family help.

Years later, Lyna’s hard work paid off with a temporary position at PeopleSoft, a Bay Area software company. Her boss recognized her diligence and hard work and offered her a full-time job that included an invaluable training program. Although she was still living paycheck to paycheck, she was able to cover both her rent and the mortgage on the house she bought her parents. 

Recognizing it would be challenging to save for the future, Lyna decided to open her own business, which had always been a life long dream. She began talking with the owner of a coffee shop she frequented in Oakland, and in return for free labor, he helped her learn the trade. She eventually launched her own restaurant, which she eventually sold.

Lyna believes in Buddha’s 10 rules of success and took them to heart. She credits Rules 4 and 5 — working hard and maintaining an optimistic outlook towards life — as key to her and her family’s success. Today, Lyna’s fortunes have turned, and she and her husband Chris Larsen are able to give back to the communities where they live and work.

Lyna is now focused on advocating for the Khmer people, both here and in Cambodia and Vietnam. Lyna is currently in the process of building a temple, always a foundation of Khmer culture, in San Jose, California. She is also the co-sponsor of the Larsen Lam ICONIQ Impact Award, which was formed to support innovative solutions to the world’s refugee crisis. Lyna is also financing a one of a kind program to catalogue and digitize all the surviving Khmer scripts, which are crucially important to maintaining the Khmer culture.

Lyna and her husband also made a transformational $25 million gift to San Francisco State University’s College of Business (now the Lam Family College of Business), where 37% of the students are the first in their families to attend college.