Empowering Asian and immigrant youth to pursue their futures

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. 

What do you think are the benefits of being able to serve young people from such a young age all the way into their adulthood?

It's a really powerful journey that Apex is able to to offer our young people. When they start with us as early as kindergarten or in first grade, we expose them to different opportunities. One of the main focuses that we hone in on at the elementary school level is to provide enrichment and new opportunities for them. If they're coming from low income backgrounds, or if they're coming from homes where there might be cultural barriers, or their parents might not speak English, for example, we're able to help them to have opportunities that they wouldn't have otherwise. These youth basically go through this journey where they're getting exposed to new opportunities, new experiences, and we help them to develop what their own interests are, and we help them to cultivate that. We provide resources so that they feel empowered with the right tools to make their own decisions. And then you get to the point where they're starting to think about college, and their parents being first generation immigrants, most of the time our youth don't have adults who can help them to navigate that journey. We help our youth to not just learn about different colleges, but the colleges that are really a best fit for them and to make their own decisions. One of the things that I feel really proud about at Apex is that we help them to make their own decisions. When we talk about empowering our youth in our mission, it's really about giving them the tools to make those decisions for themselves. We also provide paid internship opportunities, so it's not just about helping our youth to make best decisions about best fit colleges for themselves, it's also about best fit careers for themselves, and one of the things that we do is actually providing paid internships for them, so that they can explore different opportunities and different fields and and gain exposure to opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't.

What was it like for Apex for Youth during COVID-19? 

At the start of COVID, there were many, many challenges. One is that we were obviously entering a completely new world that we weren't sure how to navigate. One of the things that I think we did incredibly well was that as soon as we had to, as soon as lockdown started, we realized that we weren't going to be able to do in person programming for possibly some time. We transitioned from our all of our in person programs immediately to online and remote programming. We did that without skipping a single week. We weren't as familiar with platforms, for example, but we quickly learned it, and it was a little bit messy in the beginning. We knew that we had to continue to show up for our youth because we knew that we were entering a new world that was going to be very challenging for our youth. We took all of our programs, put them on online platforms and we made adjustments so that we could continue to show up and provide programs to our youth every weekend. That's one of the things that I think we did really well, we were able to adapt and shift very quickly. Another thing we did was we sent surveys to our young people and to our families asking what the needs were. We learned about how isolated our youth were feeling. We learned about the racism that our youth were experiencing, the bullying, and we not only checked in with our youth, we made some adjustments to our programming based on all the increasing and evolving needs that we were seeing in our community. One of the reasons why we actually started our mental health program that summer of 2020 was because we saw that our youth were experiencing increasing mental health needs, whether it's isolation, anxiety, the bullying that was happening, and that's something that has been a game changer for the organization. Asian Americans are the least likely to to seek mental health services, but they're much more likely to actually be open to services and to receive them if they have people in the community that they trust who are connecting them to those services. We knew that Apex as an organization that's been around for a long time that has developed extremely deep, deep relationships and trust with our young people, we knew that we had a pretty good shot of getting our young people to show up to our mental health services, and that's what's been happening, And now we have a team of four mental health staff which we're really happy about because we've been able to make a pretty big impact in that way,

Tell me more about the national mentoring program. What was the hope and the goal for launching it?

During the pandemic, with both the isolation happening and also the rise of anti-Asian racism, we were thinking about how could we bring our services to more youth around the country? I actually had a parent reach out to me, asking me if we offered in-person services to New Jersey. And you know, we weren't, unfortunately, but she told me about increasing suicides that were happening. I then spoke with the staff and we decided that we could take all the learnings from all the great virtual programming and start a national virtual mentoring program. And that's what we did, and it's grown over the last couple of years. Last year in 2023, we were able to reach youth in 11 states around the country as far away from New York as California and Hawaii. And I've gotten to witness some of the program, and it's really amazing. The mentors and the mentees, even through a virtual platform, they have such deep connections, and they're able to meet regularly the same way that we do with our in person programs. And it's pretty amazing what we can do in this new world with technology and the fact that you can grow relationships and develop these bonds. And I think what's powerful is that you have mentors and mentees from all around the country, and they're learning about not just other people, but about different geographies and neighborhoods. It's really opening up new worlds for them in ways that we wouldn't have been able to do prior to COVID. That's been really incredible. One of the highlights is that at the end of the year, we actually have our mentors and mentees meet in person for the first time in New York City and we actually provide the funding for our youth to be able to do that. It's incredible to see them be able to meet in-person and to travel around New York City together and get to know each other. So it's been a really moving program to kind of see develop over the last couple of years.

How did Apex for Youth handle the Supreme Court decision of now not allowing race to be a factor in college decision-making?

Both Asian Americans and the country, from the research that I've done, most of the community actually supports affirmative action in some form. Generally, we feel that all of our youth, all young people, should have the same opportunities as others and we very much value equity, and that's really why Apex was started in 1992 because we saw that there weren't enough services for Asian American young people back then.

What does the future look like for Apex for Youth? 

Right now our focus is really growing within New York City. We've provided services in downtown Manhattan, and over the last few years, we've been providing more programming in Brooklyn, and over the next few years, we'll be focusing on Queens as well. So in the next few years, we'll be providing enrichment and other athletic services. Our strategy right now is to grow, is to be able to meet the needs in New York City first, and after that, we're also thinking about potentially growing outside of New York City, not just virtually, but potentially with in person services. Those are actually the bigger goals that we have in mind, but we will be launching a strategic planning process this fall to help us to figure out the feasibility of that and the rate at which we want to grow and what is best for the organization. But throughout it, we're going to continue to do what we do best, which is focusing on our youth, centering our youth and uplifting them and helping them to believe in themselves and their own potentials and their journeys.