The Dragon Kim Foundation, an Orange County, California-based nonprofit has announced the selection of 131 teens from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds living in Arizona, California, and Nevada to the 2024 Dragon Kim Fellowship Program, including five from Scottsdale.

Serving as a social entrepreneurship incubator for high school youth, the Foundation inspires them to impact their communities while discovering and pursuing their passions, according to a press release.
Scottsdale teens selected for the Fellowship include:

• Zara Pearce, 16, of Desert Mountain High School, whose Arts Healing Hearts project will have people who lack art materials or have trouble learning art will be taught different forms of art to help provoke emotional positivity and provide different forms of coping mechanisms to deal with stress, grief, sadness, and more.
• Spark Speech, the project proposed by Nila Kathiravan, 15, of Scottsdale Preparatory Academy and her partner Sasha Ana, 17, of Desert Mountain High School is a two-week summer camp that aims to empower under-resourced middle schoolers in Phoenix by teaching writing and public speaking skills.
• Scottsdale Preparatory Academy students Maya Ravishankar and Parisa Choudhury, both 17, will be implementing their Speaking to Fly project that has them host a speech and debate camp for underprivileged students, utilizing their experiences and scholarships, and offering one-on-one tutoring.

A total of nearly 500 teens from 107 high schools in Arizona, California, and Nevada applied to the Foundation’s eighth annual cohort. The finalists will now refine and implement the 60 individual community service projects they had submitted as teams to the Foundation. The Foundation is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion.

The teens proposed projects that channel their talents and interests into a community service project that will help their communities. Projects come from a diverse set of subject areas, including academics, arts, athletics, environmental, financial literacy, and health and wellness and technology.

The teams receive three weekends of leadership training and hands-on guidance from invested professionals. who will be their mentors. Then this summer, the teams will implement their projects, supported by grants of up to $5,000 from the Foundation. The projects have the potential of benefiting thousands of people, including many living in challenged neighborhoods.

At the end of the program, the top teams will present their projects to a panel of judges at the annual Dragon Challenge, to be held in September. One team will win additional funding to continue their project.
In 2023, the Foundation directly served 10,874 individuals and logged 14,624 of volunteer hours. It is estimated as of 2023 the foundation has impacted close to 460,000 people. One hundred percent of foundation’s graduating high school students go on to college or university, and 60% go on to attend top the 25 U.S. colleges and universities.

”We’re amazed with the creative entries we received for the 2024 Dragon Kim Fellowship Program,” Dragon Kim Foundation Board Chairman and Co-founder Daniel Kim said in the release. “We thank our sponsors, mentors and other supporters for their belief in our nine-year-old organization. During this Year of the Dragon, we look forward to helping teens from diverse backgrounds bring attention to important issues in their communities that need changing and enabling them to strive to do that.”

For more information, visit http://dragonkimfoundation.org.