About
Koreatown Storytelling Program is an intergenerational, multilingual and multiethnic oral history and digital media program that teaches ethnographic and storytelling techniques to high school students and elders to investigate cultural practices and racial, economic and health inequities in our community. KSP is a project of the Koreatown Youth and Community Center (KYCC), a multiservice nonprofit that has served the limited-income immigrant population of Koreatown since 1975.
The program promotes greater understanding and respect between generations and documents marginalized narratives for preservation in public archives while also cultivating wellness outcomes for all participants.
KSP works with high school journalists and neighborhood elders in Los Angeles’s Koreatown (and its neighboring environment) to celebrate and document our stories. Our curriculum includes in-depth workshops on oral history, journalism and photojournalism, community history, interview skills and technology how-to’ s, and dialogue around cultural traditions, immigration and civil rights.
Each cohort focuses on a different theme in our community. Please read below to find out more about our past and present cohorts.
KSP’s 2023-2024 cohort explored the LGBTQIA+ community in Koreatown. We recorded our multiethnic and multilingual LGBTQIA+ older adults on their life experiences–their home countries, cultural traditions, childhood, faith, family, immigration and coming out (and not-coming out) narratives, intersectionality, discrimination, milestones and celebrations. Our curriculum studied the history (and threat to) LGBTQIA+ rights and educated our participants on LGBTQIA+ cultural competencies.
For the 2022-2023 cohort (September 2022 to May 2023), KSP explored the theme of FOOD in our neighborhood. From K-Town’s famous KBBQ spots to Guatemalan traditional street food, we interviewed the foodmakers, servers, small business owners and gardeners who make and inspire our community to be a national culinary treasure. Thanks to a National Endowment of the Arts grant in Traditional and Folk Arts, we are inviting our community elders and local chefs to lead foodmaking workshops as a means of sharing and preserving our culinary art.
For the Winter/Spring 2022 cohort, KSP studied the social construction of race, how neighborhoods in Los Angeles came to be, and the legacy of the 1992 civil unrest that decimated our Koreatown community through three days of protests that resulted in widespread and uncontained arson, looting and destruction. All of our youth participants — high school and college students, as well as recent college grads — were not yet born when this event transpired and many of them had never learned this history in school.
We are currently recruiting ELDER (55+) participants for this program.
Elder Applicants
Would you like to share your story with your community? KSP wants to hear from you! We can interview you (in-person or via Zoom), or you can write/photograph your own narrative. Please check here to get in touch with us!
-Must commit to one interview and a culmination event
-Must live/have lived in Koreatown (or immediate surrounding neighborhoods)
-Interested in giving back and sharing your experiences with your community
-Language: Korean, Spanish, Bengali, English — Open to all!
-Stipend available for elder participants
Our Partners and Supporters
KSP is grateful for the support of our community partners, foundations, and organizations who have helped make our work possible.
Our 2023-2024 project is supported, in part by the California Arts Council, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, Eisner Foundation, Honda Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Next50 Initiative, and Snap Foundation.
