Koyamada International Foundation, commonly referred to as KIF or KIF Global, is an international non-governmental organization, with its mission to improve quality of people's life by empowering global youth and women to reach their full potential and by providing humanitarian aid to promote global peace and sustainable development. It has affiliated national chapter members in seven countries.
It has global partnerships with UN agencies and international organizations such as United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), UNICEF's Education Cannot Wait (ECW), World Karate Federation (WKF), Junior Chamber International (JCI), Association of Medical Doctors of Asia (AMDA) and others.
History
The organization was initially formed when Shin Koyamada and TEDx Talk Speaker Nia Lyte shared their passions of supporting youth, humanitarian aid and cross-cultural activities in the United States. They first begun providing relief foods and drinks to underprivileged families and individuals in Downtown Los Angeles with a group of friends and promoting cultural exchange activities across the United States.
To benefit KIF's martial arts scholarship program that sponsored underprivileged youth to enroll in a martial arts school in the United States, KIF organized an international martial arts event United States Martial Arts Festival (USMAF), with over 1,000 participants representing 10 different countries and a group of world's renowned martial arts grand masters, including Fumio Demura, Tadashi Yamashita, Takayuki Kubota and businessmen who share similar international visions for the martial arts community, in Redondo Beach, California, in 2010 and 2011.
KIF signed a historic global partnership with its first UN agency named United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on women's empowerment and gender-based violence in December 2019, followed by second UN agency partnership with UNICEF's Education Cannot Wait (ECW) on education in emergencies in May, 2020.
Issue areas
There are 6 global causes that KIF and its all national chapter member organizations focus on in implementing programs, projects and activities catered to their communities and countries. For national causes, each national chapter prioritizes what it wants to focus on from the global causes to align all causes in all chapters, and create and carry out a new program or project based on the needs of its communities and territory.
Youth
To cultivate global mindset and youth leadership, KIF's national chapter member organizations have partnered up with many high schools and universities, embassies and consulates, and local governments and its board of education to organize a series of global speaker's programs for their youth students in Japan, Colombia, Kenya, United States and other countries where KIF's national chapters are based.
KIF's President Nia Lyte participated as a closing keynote speaker addressing the importance of youth and women's empowerment and leadership at Junior Chamber International (JCI)'s global partnership summit at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in 2018. In addition, KIF has participated numerous JCI's regional events with its global members to collaborate on youth leadership events in the United States and Asia Pacific region. In the following collaborations for a year, KIF and JCI signed a global partnership in February 2019 to continue the important efforts on fostering youth leaderships in different regions.
Gender Equality
KIF empowers all girls and women to be, do and achieve whatever they strongly believe they want to be, do and achieve in their lives. KIF national chapters have organized series of speaker's programs targeting over 300 women leaders per event to exchange dialogue on women's leaderships.
In December 2019, KIF has partnered with United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on a new women's empowerment and gender-based violence initiative as part of the pledges KIF has made during the 25th International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD25) held in Nairobi, Kenya, in November 2019.
Disaster & Emergency
In emergency response to earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Japan, KIF started the disaster relief program and its first national chapter organization KIF Japan in Tokyo to help victims affected by the triple disaster, by providing them the relief funds of over $120,000 raised through fundraisers as well as shipping 20-foot container filled with relief goods and items, which KIF's volunteers collected in Southern California.