An interview with Jiyoon Chung, executive director of Apex for Youth, on how the nonprofit wants to expand its services throughout New York City and beyond.
Apex for Youth has been serving low-income Asian and immigrant youth in New York City since 1992. The nonprofit, which started out of Chinatown and over the years expanded to Brooklyn and Queens, today serves more than 2,300 youth. It has offered college and career success programs that have resulted in 100% high school graduation and college enrollment rates. In recent years, the organization nearly tripled in size, with demand for services increasing alongside its impact.
New York Nonprofit Media spoke to Jiyoon Chung, the nonprofit’s executive director, about its national mentoring program, the impact COVID-19 had on its youth and the future of the organization.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about Apex for Youth and what makes the organization unique?
Our mission is to empower Asian American youth from low income backgrounds in New York City, and we help our youth to see their own potential and what is possible for their lives. So we help them to think bigger, to see bigger, to dream bigger for themselves, and we do this through mentoring and education, through athletics and mental health services. And I would say primarily, we do this through the transformative relationships that we offer to our youth, and that is through mentors, through staff, through positive adults who help our youth, but also help our youth to believe in themselves. When I started in the organization in 2011, we were serving 100 youth at the time, and now I’m proud to say that we’re serving 2,500 youth. So since then, our growth has actually been more than 20 fold. What started off as a mentoring program when we first started in 1992, we have been able to expand to many different services and different types of programming.
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