Koreatown Youth and Community Center (KYCC) has been approved for a $30,000 grant award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), for the second time, to support the Koreatown Storytelling Program. KYCC’s project is among 1,130 projects across the country, totaling more than $31 million, that were selected during this second round of Grants for Arts Projects fiscal year 2023 funding.
Koreatown Storytelling Program teaches oral history, ethnography and community journalism to youth and elders in Los Angeles’s Koreatown and its neighboring environment to celebrate and document our lifeways, heritage and identity. Through storytelling and traditional arts workshops, KYCC hopes to build bridges of understanding and collaboration among generations and communities, and increase wellness outcomes for all program participants with a focus on our most vulnerable youth and elders.
“The National Endowment for the Arts is pleased to support a wide range of projects, including KYCC’s Koreatown Storytelling Program, demonstrating the many ways the arts enrich our lives and contribute to healthy and thriving communities,” said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. “These organizations play an important role in advancing the creative vitality of our nation and helping to ensure that all people can benefit from arts, culture, and design.”
“KYCC is very honored to have received continued funding from the National Endowment for the Arts,” says Johng Ho Song, KYCC Executive Director. “This national award will allow us to continue our work and incorporate arts into our current program, which should be an important part of nonprofit work.”
In 2023-2024, KSP will explore the LGBTQIA+ community in Koreatown, recording multiethnic and multilingual LGBTQIA+ older adults on their life experiences– their home countries, cultural traditions, childhood, faith, family, immigration and coming out narratives, intersectionality, discrimination, milestones and celebrations. The curriculum will study the history (and threat to) LGBTQIA+ rights and educate participants on LGBTQIA+ cultural competencies.
For more information on other projects included in the NEA grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.
