Monthly Archives: August 2022

I’ve come full circle with One Circle Foundation. When I look back on my family heritage and upbringing, I marvel at the events, large and small, that have led me to be where I am today: at the helm of such an incredible organization. I am the proud granddaughter of Asian American ancestry. A tragic yet beautiful love story, my paternal grandparents met and fell in love in the Japanese internment camps. They adopted my father from Japan from a low-income single mother who couldn’t afford to keep all three of her children. My mother came from Korea as an exchange student and used to sell handmade jewelry at the flea market. My parents met and first flirted at a donut shop where my mother worked, which may be responsible for my life-long love affair with donuts. I grew up seeing my parents work double shifts, night shifts, and overtime to raise me and my two siblings. I’m proud and forever grateful for my parents for all they sacrificed and invested in us. I was honored to be able to see their journey from recent immigrants to professionals as a pharmacist and nurse ...

All of us - of all genders, ages, and cultures - have a role to play in solving this crisis. Underneath the abject horrors of school shootings, below the grasp of automatic rifles and magazine cartridges, exists a teenager, angry, overwhelmed, who’s endured childhood abuse, domestic violence, and severe bullying at school. According to data trackers, the adolescent is, on average, 16 years old.New York Times columnist David Brooks notes this teen is in crisis, isolated, bitter, at a breaking point, and craving revenge, power, and notoriety. And, he is male.  98% of mass shooters are male, as reported in The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic, 2021, by researchers Jillian Peterson and James Densley. We know this. But do we ask, “Why?”  As gender violence prevention educator and activist, Jackson Katz, asks, why does the media avoid saying so, most often using gender-neutral terms like shooter, perpetrator, or intruder for an action that is patently not gender-neutral? While access to assault weapons must urgently be addressed, it’s also imperative that we dig deeper to uproot a rotted source of male violence deeply embedded in our social ...