The Korean-American Community Need Project: Preliminary Report

The Beautiful Foundation USA is pleased to announce the successful completion of the first environment scanning project for the welfare needs of the local Korean-American community. With the goal of establishing a strategic direction for public resource investment in the community, the Korean-American Community Need Assessment Project identifies the high-priority welfare needs of the community. We presented the preliminary findings of the project to an audience of immigrant community experts on Friday, October 31.

The Korean-American Community Need Project consists of two separate surveys: 1) a Community Need Assessment Survey (target: key individuals in the fields of commerce, social service, culture, government, and journalism) and 2) a Community-Based Organization's Capacity Assessment (target: Korean-American community-based organizations). The design and execution of the survey has been assigned to the New York/ New Jersey Korean-American Social Worker’s Association and to Dr. Hye-Kyung Kang at Smith College respectively.
For the validity of the result, the Community Need Assessment survey targeted professionals only engaged in social welfare services, health care services, government, and business. The survey asked how important and satisfied each respondent feels about 35 community issues and public services. The respondents identified free legal aid and advocacy service and mental health prevention/treatment service as the most important service area that community should provide. Least satisfied services were those addressing gambling and substance addiction and mental treatment.

Dr. Hye-Kyung Kang, Assistant Professor at Smith College School for Social Work, collaborated on a capacity survey of 40 Korean-American community-based social service organizations in the metropolitan New York/New Jersey (NY/NJ) area. This project aimed to understand the capacity of these organizations for providing necessary social services to Korean-Americans in the area. The survey explored various domains such as the organizations' mission statements, service areas, human resources, financial resources, client characteristics, and organizational needs.

For the analysis, Dr. Kang compared the preliminary finding with that from Dr. Codero-Guzman’s previous work, Community-based organizations and migration in New York City . Compared to Codero-Guzman’s sample, Korean-American CBOs are relatively younger and more endowed with human resources in terms of volunteers. Dr. Kang recognized the strong endowment of volunteers as the potential for Korean CBOs to improve their services. On the other hand, the financial resources of Korean CBOs lack diversity distinctively compared to Codero-Guzman’s samples. Particularly, few CBOs have received government supports. Dr. Kang emphasized the importance of technical support to improve the CBO’s record keeping capacity, a prerequisite to attract institutional giving such as governments and other private foundations.