Daniel Kim Nominated for 2024 PBS SoCal Local Hero Awards Program

PBS SoCal, Southern California’s flagship PBS organization, has announced the honorees of the 2024 Local Heroes and the John and Louise Bryson Transformative Leader in Early Childhood Award initiatives.

The Local Heroes were selected from among ten outstanding nominees making a difference in the community and recommended by the organization’s Community Advisory Board. Honorees were Stacy Yung and Virginia Nguyen, co-founders of Educate to Empower as well as Dr. Alberto J. Román, Interim Chancellor of Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD).

Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Dragon Kim Foundation, an Orange County, California-based nonprofit - http://dragonkimfoundation.org – was a nominee. Kim has over 26 years of experience working on Wall Street to turn around companies in distress and continues to provide corporate strategic advice to numerous organizations. He is equally committed to philanthropy as the Foundation represents and having served on the Board of the Koreatown Youth and Community Center for two decades.

In memory of the loss of his son Dragon and Dragon’s friend Justin in a tragic camping accident, Daniel and Dragon’s mother Grace Tsai co-founded the Foundation. The organization’s community involvement began in 2015 with the creation of Dragon’s Music Program to honor the dream that Dragon had as a high school freshman to provide instruments and high-quality music education to local children, free of charge.

As Dragon had always been passionate about creating positive change in his community, Daniel was inspired to leverage his talent in business development to begin the Fellowship Program in 2016 where young leaders pursue their passions, while learning how to plan, launch, and manage their own community service projects locally in their own neighborhoods.

Today, the Fellowship program is an annual seven-month social entrepreneurship activity that awards community service grants to motivated high school students throughout Arizona, California, and Nevada. For information, visit https://dragonkimfoundation.or...

In 2025, the Foundation will have more than 60 projects in the new cohort, carefully selected from hundreds of total applications. Once chosen, the teens behind the projects will participate in three weekends of leadership and business training. Then next summer, they will implement their projects, supported by grants from the Foundation of up to $5,000 for each team. At the end of the program, they will present their project to a panel of esteemed judges at the Dragon Challenge to compete for additional funding to continue serving the community.

Since 2016, DKF has supported 457 high schoolers in channeling their passions into tangible impact by helping their communities via summer service projects. The Foundation helps them break barriers to be changemakers in challenged neighborhoods, where many also live. In 2024, the Foundation supported 119 Fellows and 718 volunteers they recruited to directly serve 16,274 individuals as they logged 17,989 volunteer hours.

“On behalf of the Foundation, I am honored to have been selected as a nominee among such a distinguished group of leaders,” Daniel Kim said.

###

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.