Khoa Truong Nguyen moved to New Zealand from Vietnam when he was a teenager, with very little English.
Fast forward a few decades, and he's now giving back to Kiwi communities in spades, and bringing his business acumen to a variety of boardrooms.
He's served on more than ten boards over the past few years, from the Lottery Grants Board, to children charity Barnado's and most recently Volleyball New Zealand.
"It's about giving back. And for me that's important, you want to give back your skillset."
Among his proudest positions, he's the only non-Māori, non-Pākehā on the investment arm of Rangitanē Tū Mai Rā Trust.
"In my interview they said 'so what do you bring to our iwi?' And I said that I would like to take Rangitanē to the world, and bring the world to Rangitanē."
And that's just what he's done through his connections to Vietnam, helping set up a partnership to create the largest solar panel system installed on a marae, at Tau Henare marae in the Northland town of Pipiwai.
It shows why boardroom diversity is more than just a box-ticking exercise.
Kirsten Patterson is the Chief Executive at the Institute of Directors (IOD) and says "there's lots of research that shows us that diverse boards perform better
"We encourage boards to make sure they have a diversity target in place and they're reporting against that. The public sector has shown the benefit of having those targets in place, it's really made an impact on those diversity numbers. But for those in some of those commercial boards, there's room for improvement."
According to National's spokesperson for ethnic communities, there's also room for improving the diversity of candidates from ethnic communities.
Melissa Lee says: "You have a ministry (Ministry for Ethnic Communities) now, a brand new one that's been in action for more than a year. What have they been doing that we haven't actually got the diversity that we should?"
Ethnic candidates make up 5.8% of boardroom positions in the latest stocktake, despite making up 16.6% of the population.
The minister in charge, Priyanca Radhakrishnan says there's "absolutely more work to be done", but that the ministry is getting good results.
"You can't be what you can't see, so we need these boards to be diverse and representative, so that people feel that there's a space for them there."
As part of the ministry's strategy, they have a service for which they can nominate ethnic candidates for public board positions.
Between January and June this year, they've nominated a record 79 candidates, of which five were successful including one for a chair position.
A further five candidates who were also on their database were successful, but had either applied independently, or been nominated by a different Ministry, for example the Ministry for Women.
She says improving diversity needs a whole of government approach, particularly with some ministerial departments, such as the Ministry for Transport - which according to the 2021 stocktake had zero ethnic representation from 46 candidates.
"I've been focused on looking at what we need to do to both increase the pipeline to strengthen the nominations service within the ministry, to ensure that people know these boards exists and why they're important, and having those conversations with colleagues about appointing people to boards," says Radhakrishnan.
Khoa Nguyen says board members like him, from ethnic communities need the helping hand from government, but fundamentally people need the skillsets too.
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