2025 Dragon Kim Fellowship has opened with up to $300,000 in grants

Calling all motivated Arizona, California, and Nevada high school students who want to make a positive difference in their communities next summer!

Orange County-based Dragon Kim Foundation, http://dragonkimfoundation.org, whose mission is to inspire our youth to impact their communities while discovering and pursuing their passions, is now seeking applications for its 2025 Fellowship cohort.

In 2024, the Foundation supported a record-setting 56 Fellowship projects run by high school students in the three states. Together, all of the projects directly impacted 16,274 individuals and indirectly impacted 1,143,433. More than 715 volunteers were empowered to contribute to the Fellows’ vision and cause.

The Foundation plans to award community service grants of up to $5,000 to as many as 60 projects devised and implemented by motivated teens. High school student teams of two or three teens are encouraged to apply for the program. Applicants must be at least 13 years old and U.S. citizens or legal residents of the state in which they are applying. Applications are open now. Those submitted by November 15 will receive an early admissions response by December 15. For more information and to apply, please visit https://www.cognitoforms.com/D...

To gain a better understanding of what’s involved, students can attend one of several virtual and in-person inspiration sessions that will be held in the weeks ahead. For more information or to sign-up for a session, visit https://calendly.com/beadragon/be-inspired-2025 Interested volunteers are encouraged to learn more at https://bit.ly/Volunteer-Interest

The Foundation will announce all winning students in the first quarter of 2025. Once chosen, these Fellows will participate in three weekends of intense leadership and business training at no costs to them that elsewhere can costs thousands of dollars. They will also be paired up with mentors with experience in their project area.

At the end of the program, they will present their project to a panel of esteemed judges at the Dragon Challenge. The top projects may be eligible to compete for additional funding to continue their projects.

In 2024, projects ranged from art therapy workshops, space exploration camps, a student film about addiction, and Hawaiian hula dancing, to computer coding, gardening, engineering, building living pods for the unhoused, and many more.

“As we launch our next class of Fellows, we are looking for inspired teens who want to make a measurable difference in their communities,” said Dragon Kim Foundation Board Chairman and Co-founder Daniel Kim. “We want to help them break barriers to be changemakers in challenged neighborhoods, where many also live.”

He said that many Dragon Kim Fellowship alumni are now attending top colleges, with the majority of Fellows now at one of the Top 25 colleges, citing Fellowship projects as one of the aspects of the students’ application that made them stand out.

“Teens who are spending their summers working in their communities to create positive change are the type of leaders that colleges are looking for, and indeed, who will comprise our next generation of leaders,” said Kim.

To learn more about sponsorships, contact Dragon Kim Foundation Co-founder and Board Chair Daniel Kim at development@dragonkimfoundation.org

The Fellowship was founded in honor of the late Dragon Kim, a talented young musician, athlete and scholar who wanted to help others. It has become a seedbed for the next generation of creative thinkers and entrepreneurs who want to create positive change.

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About the Dragon Kim Foundation

The Dragon Kim Foundation was established in 2015 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization by Grace and Daniel Kim to honor the memory of their late son Dragon Kim, who had been attending the Orange County School of the Arts. The mission of the Dragon Kim Foundation is to inspire our youth to impact their communities while discovering and pursuing their passions. Visit the website at http://dragonkimfoundation.org.