AARP Eye Center
Meet Heisung Lee, who operates a senior center for Koreans!
Heisung Lee is a superhero, a tireless crusader. She’s the volunteer behind the Korean Central Senior Center in Centreville, Virginia, which at one time served 500 seniors at a time.
Lee’s impressive program is hosted by the Korean Central Presbyterian Church in Northern Virginia. The senior center was started by the church leadership in 1994, but Lee has taken it to a whole new level. “At the time I was studying for my Masters in gerontology,” says Lee, who came to the US in 1972 to study, and met her husband and raised a family.
“I was a professional dietician at three different hospitals for 35 years and consulting for a nursing home before retiring to put all my hours into this senior center.”
The KCSC is designed exclusively for Korean Americans in the area. “All the programs are conducted in Korean. That way there are no language barriers,” Lee says. Even the food is Korean, and the center provides culturally appropriate activities.
Lee says she watched as a wave of Korean immigrants arrived in the United States in the early ‘90s, and saw the need for the center evolve over time. “That gives us 20-30 years of immigrants with adult children,” she notes.” When their grandchildren went to college they had time on their hands and wanted to be with their people and learn new things working with their hands. They loved having new possibilities.”
They also want to learn English, so Lee’s center offers three levels of English as a Second Language (ESL) courses among the 38 different classes that are available at the center.
She cites the story of one woman who didn’t know the alphabet. “She learned to the level of reading street signs and to ride Metro buses and she gets around. It gave her independence.”
The program also addresses an important issue that is a priority for AARP, isolation. “They make friends, and they’re not isolated anymore,” Lee says.
She manages this superhuman feat with financing from registration fees, governmental funding, church donations and good old-fashioned fundraising efforts. The program operates with only two part-time paid staff, plus lots of volunteers, up to 75 per day, of whom 120 have been with the program for 15 years.
Only a superhero could accomplish such great thing.
Written by Gil Asakawa, AARP AAPI Marketing Communications Consultant
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