From Koreatown Roots to Community Hero

Meet Daily Point of Light Award honoree Elton Cho. Read his story, and nominate an outstanding volunteer or family as a Daily Point of Light.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Elton Cho walked the busy streets of Koreatown and attended classes at Wilton Place Elementary School, never realizing how deeply those same blocks would shape his future purpose. Years later, having built a successful career in finance, Elton felt a powerful pull to return to his roots. He found his gateway back through the Koreatown Youth Community Center (KYCC), an organization located just down the street from where his own educational journey began. His service quickly bloomed into a deeply personal mission to uplift the next generation of his childhood neighborhood.

As a Managing Director at Ares, Elton recognized that his most valuable contribution wasn’t just his time, but his specialized professional expertise. Spotting a critical gap in early financial education, he took the initiative to design, build, and lead a custom Investing and Finance club for local students. Transitioning seamlessly from high-level corporate finance to the classroom, Elton developed an engaging curriculum tailored to demystify complex economic concepts for students of all ages, ranging from elementary workshops to middle and high school cohorts. Under his guidance, young students are empowered to take notes, research stocks, and confidently discuss foundational market principles like “Market Cap,” “tariffs,” and the “S&P 500.”

Elton’s innovative program has even earned college credit recognition for KYCC students, opening doors to higher education and future careers long before they even graduate high school. His unique framework perfectly mirrors the core philosophy of the Ares In Motion (“AIM”) initiative, proving that when professional talent meets community passion, it creates a sustainable blueprint for lasting societal change.

Elton was recently celebrated as a community hero on center court during the Los Angeles Clippers’ Korean Heritage Night, a massive honor that brought his journey full circle in front of the city he loves. Furthermore, his efforts helped secure KYCC’s selection as this year’s Elevating API Voices ERG Charitable Giving Winner. Read on to hear more of his inspiring story.

Tell us about your volunteer role and organization.

I lead an “Investing & Finance Club” for Koreatown Youth Community Center (KYCC), a nonprofit in Los Angeles that provides various resources for recently immigrated or economically disadvantaged families, including after-school programs, mental health counseling, and small business development aid. My work began in 2024 with a series of workshops for its after-school students. Since then, we’ve had Spring and Fall sessions spanning elementary, middle, and high school, each with weekly guided lessons and a hands-on game, in which students pick a favorite company or stock to track over the coming weeks, competing for prizes. The goal of the program is to introduce foundational economics, business, and investing topics to the students in a fun and immersive way, including how to measure the health of a company, defining revenues, cost, and profits, how to think of an economic value for a company, what a stock is and what it represents for a company, and how to think of a portfolio, diversification, and the power of compounding.

This was a personal passion project that began casually and with some trial-and-error – I would just come by KYCC on Friday afternoons and chat to the students about what was happening in the markets. Along the way, we figured out a more formalized curriculum structure and expanded the partnership with KYCC to cover various community service events, such as Koreatown beautification and cleanup events, volunteering for its annual Holiday carnival, and painting a mural for its pre-school campus. This also wouldn’t have been possible without the support and time of some of my amazing colleagues at Ares Management. Big thanks to everyone who showed up for the community!

Why is this issue so important to you?

First, I’m a huge finance and stocks nerd. Second, I was born and raised in Koreatown, Los Angeles, just down the street from KYCC and my elementary school, and I can’t thank the community enough for all it’s given me and my family. This is a way to pay it forward, in the limited ways that I know how. My parents immigrated from Korea when they were teenagers, knowing very little English and with a very unclear path for their future here. But they acclimated and, through various jobs at convenience stores, local advertising agencies, and kimbap snack shops, were able to support me and my sister. I’m deeply grateful to them for taking the risk to set up a new life here, instilling in me my love for this community, and for constantly reminding me of my roots.

Their experiences did instill a somewhat risk averse mentality when it came to personal finance, however, a completely natural outcome after grinding for every dollar of cash earned. There was some anxiety or discomfort of the unfamiliar financial system here, compounded further by general market volatility, which I felt was a common sentiment amongst friends who were also from immigrant families.

Also, prior to college, our school curriculum included almost zero exposure to finance and investing, aside from some tangential lessons from courses like AP Economics. I think this is unfortunate and still significantly disadvantages immigrant, lower-income families today. It might be the case that, even with knowledge of the markets and personal finance, they decide for themselves that they’ll still err on the side of risk aversion and have less of an appetite for equity markets. However, it’s important that they’re at least given the option and ability to participate, and I believe any early exposure can help. The power of compounding applies much greater to a dollar invested as a child than a dollar invested as an adult.

What inspired you to get started with this initiative?

My love and pride for Koreatown runs deep, but I always felt like I wasn’t doing my part. One day, I was catching up with an elementary school friend over some soju and reminiscing about the taekwondo classes, Korea’s epic 2002 World Cup run, and trading “Yu-Gi-Oh” cards at the playground. KYCC also came to mind, particularly because I had recently been involved in coaching a very close friend through the interview process for finance jobs. It was a bit of a rollercoaster given a tough job market, but thankfully it ended with success and became an incredibly rewarding experience that made me realize I may have a knack for teaching. So this program seemed like a perfect way to bring everything full circle and I brought up the idea with KYCC. They loved it… and the rest is history!

Any future partnerships, programs or events that you are excited about?

I’m excited to continue evolving this program with future sessions – we’ve now worked with every grade level KYCC supports, tweaking the complexity of the curriculum accordingly, but there’s always something new to add, a new market event that’s topical, or a new stock in vogue. Markets never stand still!

Hopefully, we can also ramp up the scale of the program. I can only be in one place at one time, and I also still have a fulltime day job! So sheer time and bandwidth have been the biggest limiters, but we’ve been thinking of ways to get other organizations involved or have others run with the curriculum in other locations. We’re also working on some more programming with KYCC this year, including an office visit “career day” and Korean Heritage Nights for some sporting events.

What are your long-term plans or goals for the organization?

KYCC has an incredible history in the community already, now over 50 years old, and I’m very bullish on where it can go from here. I admire all the staff members and volunteers I’ve met there, and it’s clear that they are not only good at what they do, but inherently amazing human beings who can empathize with a wide array of backgrounds. I hope I can just be one part of that and help it impact more families, carry over into future generations, and continue being a safe haven for the community.

Specifically for my program, the goal isn’t necessarily to have every third grader understand discounted cash flow models years from now. Rather, I just hope some of the curiosity for personal finance, economics, and the markets sticks. Someday many years from now, we can also look back at their stock picks, hopefully see how much they compounded, and maybe they’ll even be inspired to pursue careers in business or finance.

What’s been the most rewarding part of your work?

I was worried that the students might find the topics boring or difficult to relate to, so I was incredibly grateful that their reaction was the exact opposite. Their attention and enthusiasm motivated me to keep this program going, and it’s been the highlight of the week for every week we’ve had the program. They would jump from their seats when I come into the classroom and immediately ask which stock had won, how theirs did, and what the key reasons were – seeing the intellectual curiosity was truly heartwarming. I also felt so proud that at such a young age and after just a few lessons, they could recall concepts like diversification, enterprise value, and stagflation. I was nowhere near that precocious – personally, I learned the definition of EBITDA at a way later age than any of them!

What have you learned through your experiences volunteering?

There was a ton of nostalgia for me with this program and it reminded me of my own roots and upbringing in Koreatown. I went to public school through high school and never managed to go to paid private after-school or tutoring programs, so I know the value that institutions like KYCC brings to the community. The importance of keeping in mind where I came from really struck me and it was great to connect with students and families of such diverse backgrounds – we can always improve on our ability to empathize. We also always hear the phrase, “Explain like I’m 5” and I do think this experience has helped me practice putting myself in the shoes of the audience and calibrating a lesson so it resonates as effectively as possible, which I’m now more conscious of in my everyday job. Whether you’re in an investment committee meeting in an alternative asset management firm or an elementary school workshop, communication is key.

The students also undoubtedly taught me some finance lessons themselves. For the record, I was also picking stocks during these games, and I got absolutely trounced every season – whether by an under-the-radar shipping ETF, an Asian toy company, or a play on the AI semiconductor supply chain. Although, as a team, our picks did outperform the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 fairly consistently, so I’d like to think there was some wisdom of the crowd here!

Why is it important for others to get involved with causes they care about?

My students taught me the importance of “touching grass.” They’re much more in touch with current slang and colloquialisms, but this essentially means stepping away from the daily bubble of corporate work hustle.

I think we can all get insular in our thinking when working and socializing with the same crowd in our everyday lives. This experience felt very humanizing and reminded me that there’s a lot more that can be learned when detaching from an Excel spreadsheet or Bloomberg terminal for a bit. A broader perspective goes a long way, and if a community has played such an integral role as Koreatown did for me, it’s only right that I give something back, as small as the effort may be in the grand scheme of things.

Any advice for people who want to start volunteering?

If there’s a community or opportunity you’re interested in, don’t be afraid to take the leap. My issue when starting out was “’analysis paralysis.” I wanted to make sure to optimize for time and resources, while I didn’t come across volunteer roles that hit all the notes of what I was looking for. Even when I had the initial inspiration for the KYCC project, I had some reservations because I didn’t have a fully baked curriculum and I worried the kids wouldn’t find it engaging.

But I’m very glad I got the ball rolling, iterated and took feedback along the way, and embraced some spontaneity. For example, as a starting point, if there’s an organization whose mission resonates with you, don’t be afraid to make a cold outreach, have an introductory conversation, and brainstorm together on what exact role you might be able to play. Simply put, just go for it!

Do you want to make a difference in your community like Elton? Find local volunteer opportunities.