Dear Members and Leaders of KAPN

Chase B. Park, President, KAPN

It is an honor to serve as president alongside our dynamic group of executive team leaders and board members. Their dedication to our mission both inspire me and ground my positive outlook about what lies ahead.

Over the past few years, we have started an amazing transition through the generations of Korean Americans and continued to enhance the culture and philosophy of KAPN with the first generation laying the foundation with core values of discipline and hard work, past generations capturing and recognizing successes in all parts of business and society, and current generations challenging the status quo and breaking through barriers so that future generations can achieve the highest levels of success and recognition in America and around the world.

I commend our board for recognizing the swiftly changing trends in society and mainly our membership demographics, and thinking critically to align our programming better with current and future members’ needs and desires.

Since last year, we have challenged ourselves to think outside the box and provide programming to truly benefit our membership during today’s times and help everyone to improve themselves, not only professionally, but also personally at the same time. I think we are taking the right approach with the recent ‘Health and Wellness’ and ‘Relationship Series’ Professional Speaker Series events. We also restructured our approach to student mentorship by getting students directly involved in all planning aspects of our annual Youth Empowerment Seminar and asking recently graduated mentees to come back and serve as mentors for our College Student Mentoring Program.

COVID-19 has halted much of our activity in 2020, but it has also allowed us to get more connected with the community through working with our sponsors to honor our hospital workers with donations of meals, and partnering with DKNet AM 730 radio to allow the Korean community to show its resilience and complete a successful COVID-19 Relief Fund campaign, raising more than $17,000 that was used to donated KN-95 masks to first responders at Irving PD, Carrollton PD, Parkland Hospital, and The North Texas Food Bank.

Through these experiences, we’ll continue to develop stronger relationships with other community organizations and broaden our network to identify more passionate, committed leaders who will help to actively carry out our mission to establish new heights in society as Korean Americans and equip the next generations to continue to raise our professional status in America.

Everyone in our network should be proud of how far we’ve come in a little over a decade with the original vision of supporting immigrants looking to start their professional careers in America. However, we are nowhere close to being satisfied with our current situation and understand there is much work to be done to break through tangible and intangible barriers to achieve the recognition we deserve in this society.

I urge you to stay connected and get involved, and do your part to make a difference. I am excited to see what we can accomplish, together.