Description of the overall organization
The Dragon Kim Foundation (DKF) was founded in honor of 14-year-old Dragon, who was killed in a tragic accident in 2015. He had a heart for community service and wanted to provide opportunities for others to learn and grow. DKF continues his legacy, empowering high school students to realize their potential, and develop social entrepreneurship skills while nurturing their desires to effect change and better their communities while collaborating with community partners.
Description of Project/Program
The Dragon Kim Foundation’s Fellowship Program is the cornerstone of their organization. It is an entrepreneurship incubator program that targets diverse, low-income entrepreneurial–minded high school students from California and Nevada. They receive 6 months of rigorous leadership and business training, and work with a mentor to create a business plan focused on serving underserved populations in their community. At the completion of training, each team receives up to $5,000 to launch their project in the summer. Project service areas in 2021 included food insecurity, disabilities, healthcare, environment, seniors, cultural pride, STEM and career readiness.
Description of how the Impact Giving grant funds will be used:
DKF hopes to expand their fellowship program from 62 students with 28 service projects in 2021 to 75 students and 32 projects in 2022. This grant would provide funding for the additional students and increase support for disadvantaged students.
High Impact & Life Transforming
The Fellowship Program creates young change makers who achieve personal growth while effectively leveraging their training to make significant impacts on a range of underserved and marginalized populations.
Education
One of the main goals of the Fellowship is to empower young people to realize their potential and create opportunities for education that underserved youth would otherwise not have. High school students have incredible ideas for how to better their communities, but don’t have the experience or connections to run large scale projects. The mentorship and leadership training provided is vital to their education.
Sustainability
The Fellowship Program is sustained financially through donations from individuals, grants and corporate sponsorships. In addition, mentors donate their time. 18 of the community service projects have continued past the initial year and 4 secured 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. Many alumni volunteer, and the first college graduating class this year will provide the first round of Dragon Mentors.
Community Building
Since the Fellowship Program was launched in 2016, they have trained 185 Fellows, worked with 96 mentors and 80 community partners, awarded and invested $442,000, and implemented community service projects which have directly impacted 11,000 underserved individuals and indirectly more than 46,000 community members.
Innovative
Many programs encourage teenagers to do community service but do not provide hands on mentoring or funding to enable teens to make their ideas a reality. This program works with teens at the beginning of the process when the project is just an idea, helps them develop the idea, and provides the training and grants to bring the project to life. The Fellowship Program is innovative because it leverages different components effectively to make a big impact with nominal dollar amounts. They also run multiple projects simultaneously to serve many diverse, underserved individuals each year.
Measurable
Measurement for Success of the Fellowship Program:
- Social entrepreneurship training workshops (up to 32 service project teams)
- 90% of Fellows will rate training was valuable to their professional development and creation of their project
- 5,000+ underserved community members will benefit from the service projects
- 85% of underserved individuals served will report they benefited from the program
Fall: Fellowship managers and ambassadors visit school campuses in California and Nevada to present “Inspiration Sessions” about the program.
October - January Applications accepted; volunteers review applications
February - Finalist interviews and winners announced
March - 40 hours of intensive social entrepreneurship development and leadership training, including partnership with a business mentor who guides the creation of a business plan and makes networking introductions.
Summer – $5,000/team distributed to launch projects, and at the end Fellows evaluate their projects to determine the impact on their community.
September - “Dragon Challenge” for opportunity to win additional funds to continue service projects through the end of the year.
Organization’s Mission Statement
To inspire our youth to impact their communities while discovering and pursuing their passions.
Link to the website: https://dragonkimfoundation.org/
