Kaylee Cho
Kaylee Cho is a first-generation Korean American climate resilience specialist at KYCC in Koreatown, Los Angeles. After pivoting from pre-med to public health at UCLA — shaped by her father's health struggles and a growing curiosity about how environment and zip code determine wellbeing — she found her calling in community-based environmental work. Now leading the Keep Koreatown Environmental Equity project, she focuses on extreme heat adaptation for one of L.A.'s most vulnerable communities, driven by the belief that resources should come to the people, not the other way around.
This Is Our Home, and We Need to Take Care of It
Interview by Heidy Montiel and Timothy Lee
Could you start by telling us your name, your age, and where you were born?
My name is Kaylee. I’m 23 years old. I was born at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, California.
How do you identify?
I believe I’m first-generation. My parents immigrated here, and I was born here. My gender is genderfluid, and my pronouns are she/they. I’m Korean American.
You stated that you were born in Los Angeles. Is that your hometown? Specifically, what neighborhood did you grow up in?
I was born at the Good Samaritan Hospital, and we moved to Orange County, where my parents started a deli business called Black Beauty. [It was] named after my Chinese Korean zodiac [sign] because I was born in the year of the horse. I believe they ran that business for a couple of years, and then we moved back to Koreatown, Los Angeles, where I grew up for most of my life.
Could you tell us a little bit more about your family? You mentioned that you were a first-generation immigrant.
Both of my parents immigrated from South Korea to the U.S. to pursue higher education. My mom came here to pursue a master’s in costume design at FIT. My dad came here straight from high school to pursue his bachelor’s degree, but he never graduated.
How many other family members do you have? Could you elaborate more about your parents’ education and occupations once they got to the United States?
I believe all of my extended family lives in South Korea, [including] my cousin’s family from my maternal side as well as my paternal side. We are the only family members in the U.S. currently. As I mentioned before, both my mom and dad immigrated here for their education. They stayed here afterward.
What was your childhood like growing up here in Los Angeles?
It felt a little isolating because I grew up and lived in Koreatown, Los Angeles, but I attended a French international school where all of my peers were white. A lot of my Korean friends I knew through Sunday school because I used to attend this program at a church our family went to every Sunday, so my experience growing up felt a little different [from theirs]. So that felt a little bit isolating, even though I’m Korean American. I wanted to connect to my parents’ heritage. A lot of my peers did not have the same experiences as [I did].
What were your dreams and interests when you were growing up? You mentioned just now that you wanted to become more connected with your Korean heritage.
I think part of the reason I was enrolled in a French international school was that my mom’s dream for me was to work for the UN when I was older, and one of the primary languages you have to speak in the UN is French. So I was enrolled in that school for that reason. I think for a large part of my life, I was trying to come out of that dream because that’s kind of like my parents’ expectations of me versus what I wanted to do with my life.
I started getting interested in nonprofit work growing up, specifically Doctors Without Borders. I had a pen pal in South Africa growing up, and she would tell me about all of her experiences. That really ignited a passion [in me] to work in public health, so I wanted to pursue higher education in France because I was attending a French school and wanted to utilize the fact that I was more fluent in French than in English or Korean. My dream school was Sorbonne University. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, I had to apply to U.S. universities at the last minute, and I got into UCLA as a biology major.
Could you elaborate a bit more about what Doctors Without Borders was?
Doctors Without Borders is a non-governmental organization [that works] with low-income countries that might not have the resources they need to get health services. It might be due to war or terrorism, or it just might be because the government does not have the resources to care for the public.
What inspired you to study public health at UCLA?
Kind of going off of what I was saying earlier. I started at UCLA as a biology major and pre-med. From my classes, I wanted to learn a little more about what impacts health outside the hospital or during a visit with the doctor. I wanted to learn a lot more about that, so I started getting internships and volunteer experience in the community, and I realized I wanted to work more with the community in a hospital or clinical setting. So I changed my major to public health in my sophomore year [of college], and this was also around the time when public health became a new major at my university. It wasn’t [offered] before then, so I thought it was a sign and switched my major.
Do you think there was a specific moment that triggered you to switch from working in a hospital to focusing on how these issues start in the community?
Actually, growing up for a large part of my life, I was estranged from my father, and when I came into adulthood, we were able to reconnect again. When we reconnected, my dad was going through a lot of heart complications, so throughout my undergrad, he underwent four open-heart surgeries. That was a really jarring experience for me. I was learning through that experience the reason why he was dealing with health complications, even though he’s relatively not that old to be going through those health complications. I was starting to realize that there were so many social determinants of health that impact your life, and even your children’s lives, so I wanted to study a little bit more about what impacts your health. Is it your race? Is it your ethnicity? Is it your age? Does it depend on the zip code that you live in, the resources available to you, or the environment that you live in? That was a huge contributing factor in my life to pursue public health.
Once you were researching more outside factors that play a role in your health, like your community, where you live, your race, and things like that, was there anything in particular that just stuck with you and shocked you?
I can talk about my experience as a community-based research intern with Breathe Southern California, which is a nonprofit organization that studies the connection between public health and environmental health. So my dad is a taxi driver; he spends like 12 to 14 hours a day on the road. When you think about that, you think about how much that could impact your health. He’s consuming a lot of air pollutants on a day-to-day basis. Another jarring thing to think about is that he’s not eating meals regularly or sleeping regularly. So that’s what drew me to environmental health.
Through that experience, I started to realize how even the most invisible things can be really impactful in a person’s life. That experience was an eye-opening moment for me, [leading me] to pursue environmental sciences. Other than that, because public health is such a broad discipline and there are so many specializations you can pursue, I wanted to pursue how health insurance literacy and health utilization impact your health. I want to find that sweet spot between public health and environmental health.
What other stories did you hear while you were working at Breathe Southern California that you learned from and inspired you further to pursue public health?
Part of my role at Breathe was to assess the needs of the [Los Angeles] Koreatown community, because even [within] that organization, they realized there wasn’t enough data for Koreatown, specifically on social or environmental vulnerabilities. In that role, we were interviewing a lot of community members. [They were] Spanish-speaking, Korean-speaking, and English-speaking community members within the borders of the Koreatown L.A. area.
I realized that there is a gap between knowing what resources are out there and even how to access them. So that became very apparent to me, for instance, after we collected all of the data and analyzed it. What we realized was that a lot of tenants, because Koreatown is a mostly renter population, had mold in their homes. They would tell their landlords about the issue, but their landlords would try to find loopholes to avoid that issue by painting over the mold or just ignoring the mold problem altogether.
A lot of the tenants were also scared of the landlords retaliating against them and evicting them if they brought up the issue again. They were unsure how to deal with the mold issue and what the legal ways [are] to remediate mold in your home. What was evident to me from that experience was that they knew they needed to get the mold remediated as soon as possible because mold, especially for people who have pre-existing conditions like asthma or elderly people or even children, [needs to be] removed as soon as possible. So they knew what the problem was and what they needed to do, but they didn’t know how to do it. That’s why I was so drawn to nonprofit work and working closely with communities in order to bridge that gap.
What other initiatives did you take part in to help combat that lack of knowledge, such as how to get rid of mold?
After we presented the findings to our board and community members, we were trying to find out what was within our scope to help the patients we were seeing through our asthma remediation program who [complained] about mold in their homes. So we developed a referral program with a tenants’ rights organization called Sage. Through this referral program, we would refer our patients dealing with mold in their homes to the program directly, and they would [provide] legal resources and lawyers to help them through the legal process of removing mold in their homes without fearing retaliation from their landlords.
Did your time working at Breathe also lead you to work on mental health policies? If not, what did it inspire you to do?
A big part of my undergraduate career was to find what I wanted to specialize in in public health. I wouldn’t say my experience at Breathe Southern California was directly related to my internship with Beach Cities Health District to develop a mental health policy toolkit. That was more of an experience to see if I wanted to pursue mental health because that is also a topic that I was really passionate about. I do see how what I learned from that experience [can connect] to environmental health and environmental sciences.
How did you find your experience there? How did that impact your future endeavors?
It was really interesting for me because it was part of a capstone project I needed to complete to graduate from college. I would be presenting in front of a lot of nonprofit organizations and the director of our school. It was definitely a really nerve-wracking experience, but it was very helpful for me to learn how to strengthen an organization’s policies when it comes to mental health. That’s really helpful for me in my role now as a climate resilience specialist at KYCC because I have to develop capacity-building trainings for our staff so that they know how to implement community engagement strategies when they’re out in the field and at events to inform the public about what resources we have at KYCC that can help them address their issues.
How did you first become connected to Career Talent and the KYCC Environmental Services team?
In high school, I was receiving mental health therapy services from KYCC, and that was my first experience interacting with the organization. Later in college, I was the outreach coordinator for a student-run organization called LEASES, which had a partnership with KYCC’s tax prep unit, so I worked with KYCC then as well to serve Korean-speaking elders who needed help filing taxes and their tax returns. That was my second experience with KYCC, and then here I am as a climate resilience specialist. When I saw this opportunity, it felt like a full-circle moment. In my previous experiences, I was receiving services, and then I was an intern, but now I’m actually a [staff member]. That was a really rewarding experience for me.
You mentioned feeling sort of like a stranger growing up. Do you think being connected to KYCC finally helped you find a place where you could connect?
I was thinking about this the other day. This is like my first time feeling so supported by the staff and the community here, and that’s a really comforting thing for me, especially because I felt really isolated growing up. I strive to do my best at my job, and even if I make mistakes, I have a support system in a professional setting. That makes me happy.
What does climate resilience mean to you, especially in a neighborhood like Koreatown?
When I think of climate resilience, I think of how resilient a community is to a changing environment due to climate change. When I think of Koreatown, L.A., specifically, I think of a high renter population and of old and aging infrastructure with a lack of AC units, building electrification programs, and growing issues like mold in homes. So when I think of climate resilience, I think of both adaptation and mitigation strategies to kind of combat the effects of climate change.
For this community in Koreatown, being such a vulnerable community, having lots of elders or first-generation immigrants, how do you think the community can come together to fight against these social issues?
When it comes to communities coming together, even if they might pertain to different identity groups, I think it’s about uplifting the pride of the community. A lot of the work we do here at KYCC, even outside the environmental services unit, is to hold these events so that different community members can come together to work on a solution [for an issue] they’re all facing. Even if you have a different gender identity or you’re from a different racial group, if you’re facing the same problem, you’re all going to be passionate about solving that problem. I think it’s about creating a space that is accessible for people to meet, discuss those problems, and share solutions.
Koreatown experiences extreme heat and poor air quality and has limited green spaces. How do you think this impacts the community?
Well, I think that’s a difficult question to answer because I can spend like an hour answering that question. All of those issues are kind of interrelated. Extreme heat events are related to the effects of climate change. Air quality is also part of climate change. As a community, the direction we need to move forward is a systems-level change, right? When I’m talking about aging infrastructure and a lack of building electrification, lack of AC units, and lack of green spaces — Koreatown only has two parks, so we need to think about how the city can implement more green spaces to [offset] the air quality and extreme heat by creating more shade. We need to think about shading at bus stops and at hydration stations available at public libraries, recreation centers, and parks. But we also need to think about how we can transition our infrastructure. That’s a little more difficult to do as a community-based organization. We need to work with the city or council districts to enact that kind of change.
Being part of Los Angeles, where there’s such a high-density population, how do you think we can target more individuals who are homeless or facing addiction while also being impacted by these issues?
I think that’s a great question. People don’t realize this when they talk about environmental health, but I would think that the environment is interconnected with everything. You mentioned the homeless population. That’s part of a bigger issue of housing instability, right? The rising prices of homes, when this population is mostly [renters], whereas the economy is plummeting. I think it’s really difficult to navigate that. As an organization, we are trying to reach all demographics, whether that be the unhoused, the renter population, or even homeowners. We’re trying to target all demographics.
From your perspective, what are the most urgent environmental challenges that we see here?
From my perspective, I was hired to work on a specific grant called the Keep Koreatown Environmental Equity project, focusing on extreme heat events in the Koreatown area and how our community can adapt. The most important environmental issue we need to focus on as a community is extreme heat events.
What are some changes in the community that you have seen as an impact of extreme heat events? What are some of the impacts?
When a community faces extreme heat events for a long period of time, this affects both [physical] and mental health. There are studies that show when you’re experiencing very hot days, especially for workers who work outside, like construction workers, there is a risk of death, but there is also a risk of your mood fluctuating, being more irritable and angry. I think not [many] people think about that.
What do you think people misunderstand most about climate change or environmental health?
People think they don’t see the differences or effects of climate change directly. They think they can kind of ignore it or prioritize something else, but this is our home, and we really need to take care of it.
What do you think are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned so far from working in the community and throughout your entire career?
The biggest lesson I learned is to always engage in empathy and meet community members where they are. That means bringing the resources to them and not having them go out of their way to get the resources they need. A lot of the people we work with already face barriers to reaching.
There are people who already face barriers when reaching for those resources. That’s an important lesson I’ve learned, especially with the ongoing ICE raids and the community feeling a lack of trust in our government. I think it’s always important to understand that and engage in empathy.
In the future. What are your goals in bettering some of these issues that you’ve mentioned?
Right now, as a climate resilience specialist, I’m seeing the importance of research that backs what we see in our communities, so I want to pursue grad school for that research experience and come back to the nonprofit sector to help nonprofits understand the growing issues in our communities.
What gives you hope when you’re thinking about the future of climate justice?
What gives me hope is how nonprofits are working hard to fight for these issues. Everyone who works in a nonprofit is really passionate about what they do, so that gives me a lot of hope that we have the right people fighting for the right things.