Help Us Create, Share, and Preserve Korean American Stories
Dear friends of Korean American Story,
As we close out another remarkable year together, we want to say thank you. Your support — your views, comments, shares, and donations — has made it possible for Korean American Story (KAS) to continue uplifting the voices, memories, and experiences of our community.
In 2025, our 15th year as an organization, we expanded our commitment to capturing stories that too often go unheard. With your help, we launched and grew several major initiatives that deepened our impact across generations and communities:
Letters to My Hometown
Through the Letters to My Hometown project, we preserved and shared the stories of Korean Americans whose families were separated during the Korean War, focusing on both the first generation (elders with direct memories of the war and separation from family) and the younger generations who inherited the emotional and historical legacies of their family’s past. The project provided a space for these generations to connect through intergenerational dialogue and created opportunities for collective healing and understanding. We were able to record 9 families and began publication in November.
Queer Joy in Conversation
Queer Joy in Conversation is a video project of multi-person conversations featuring 6 groups of Korean Americans within the LGBTQIA+ community, focusing on the meaning of queer joy in their lives, and what that journey of finding it may look like. This will serve as the second part to an already published series, where we featured single-person interviews with folks from the KA queer and trans community. This project’s mission is to destigmatize conversations around sexuality and gender, while highlighting the ever-changing nuances of those identities.
ROAR Story Slam All Stars
In April 2025, we hosted our flagship storytelling live event, ROAR Story Slam, at the iconic Joe’s Pub in NYC. We showcased personal stories from Korean Americans of diverse backgrounds. This year, we invited the participants of previous ROAR Story Slam competitions to be part of our “All Stars” event. It was a fun and cathartic experience to be in a room full of Korean Americans laughing and crying together, unapologetically as ourselves.
Legacy Project & Expanding our Archive at USC
We continued documenting the lives of incredible Korean Americans whose stories deserve to be preserved, ensuring that future generations have access to a rich, expansive, and diverse historical record. This year, we are thrilled to add 52 additional videos to the archive at the University of Southern California’s Korean Heritage Library, bringing the total number of archived videos to 405.
Korean Adoptee Storytelling Initiative (2026 Launch)
A groundbreaking effort to work with Korean adoptees and adoptee organizations across Chicago, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Seattle, Minneapolis, and New York. We will produce short films, oral histories, workshops, and community gatherings that honor the complex journeys, identity, and belonging of Korean American adoptees.
These projects are ambitious, and they are necessary. Storytelling heals. It connects. It teaches. It preserves our history and empowers our future.
To make all of this possible, we rely on you—our community.
As a nonprofit, every donation directly fuels our storytelling programs, film production, community workshops, and the preservation of our shared history.
Will you make a year-end gift to support our programs?
Your contribution, no matter the size, helps ensure that Korean American stories continue to be told with dignity, depth, and care.
DONATE TODAY and stand with us as we uplift the voices of our community.
Thank you for believing in the power of our stories.
Thank you for being part of the Korean American Story family.
With gratitude,
HJ Lee
Executive Director
Korean American Story
Our Founders, HJ Lee & Theresa Choh-Lee