Jae-yong Chang’s initial idea was to build a foundation that grants financial scholarships to members of underrepresented groups in Korea—in particular, college students from regional minor universities. With the fortuitous appearance of a generous donor who had a plot of land in California, Jae-yong’s idea swiftly developed into an audacious dream of also constructing a traditional Korean residential style building (Hanok) in the Bay Area. He was finally able to form the nonprofit organization on June 22, 2016 and named it the Korean American Friendship Foundation.
Upon Jae-yong’s request for joining in the Hanok project as the master planner, GC Jung, who had just graduated from KU in August 2016, embarked on the implementation of Jae-yong’s plan. Subsequently, GC contributed to steering the organization toward what it is today. GC proposed to first build a traditional Korean garden on the land and change the vision for the organization’s use of the land. He suggested that the organization, though nonprofit, should assume a revenue generation model to sustain itself rather than only relying on donations and that it should play a part in fostering the awareness of Korean culture in the US by showing the sustainability of the traditional Korean relationship with nature. The garden and Hanok could act as a place of recreation and education for the local community in which it was located. This was the impetus for renaming the organization to the Sustainable Korean Culture Institute in September 2016.
With participation from Berkeley colleagues Clare You, Julie Baek and Albert F. Chung, the Institute succeeded in acquiring status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with public charitable purposes in February 2017.
In April 2017, an opportunity for the Institute arose at a symposium about digital humanities in the field of archaeology held at UC Berkeley. Among the presentations, we were especially impressed at the 3D facsimiles by Factum Arte from Spain. We developed the idea of applying the technologies of digital preservation to Korean art overseas, including those in North Korea, many of which are rarely or never open to the public. Meanwhile, we formed a consortium with Postmedia, an IT company in South Korea that has worked on the digital archiving of Korea’s cultural heritage. In collaboration with Postmedia, the Institute is currently working to establish a digital heritage consortium organization, Greening Artistic Heritage of Asia.