Southpole & AAO Donate to Share the Love Campaign | We’ve Raised $1 Million!

On October 14, the employees of Southpole made a donation of $100,000 and the employees of AAO made a donation of $10,000 to KAAGNY’s COVID-19 Share the Love Food Relief Campaign.

“It is our hope that we will be able to help at least one other person, and to help foster a culture of giving within our community,” Southpole executives and employees said as they delivered the donation to KAAGNY on the 14th. “We also hope that this fundraising effort will spread beyond the Americas to the rest of the world.”

“We made the decision to donate in the hopes that it will help us overcome difficult times together,” AAO executives and employees said. “We hope that by sharing we will also make the Korean American community feel warmer this coming winter.”

It is the first time that the Korean community has collectively raised over $1 million towards a campaign that will directly benefit Korean American families experiencing difficulty during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The fundraising effort [of the Share the Love Campaign] is one for the books,” Korean American historian Jong Moo Cho said. “It is no exaggeration to say that we have collectively changed the landscape of the Korean community’s donation culture.”

Since the launch of the Share the Love Campaign in September, KAAGNY has received an overwhelming flood of thank you messages from applicants to the campaign. Upon seeing how wide this community effort has become, applicants have uniformly said that they would live a life of caring for their neighbors in the future.

As we have come to learn through the application process, many of our community members are experiencing an array of difficult circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several of the applicants of the Share the Love Campaign are living with disabilities. One applicant who has a cognitive disability said that he is living with two younger siblings, unable to meet rent deadlines due to his mother’s loss of employment during the pandemic. Another applicant shared a painful story of supporting her husband who has complications from diabetes, and that she is barely paying rent with her son’s income from his part-time job.

President Charles Yoon said, “I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the donors who have shown great support for those who desperately need help. Like the name of the campaign suggests, we can unite our community more firmly by ‘Sharing the Love’ with our neighbors.” President Yoon added, “The more we uplift others, our collective strength and happiness will be doubled. I hope that you will join us in this campaign, so that we can create a better society for the marginalized members of our community.”