Im Ja Choi, Asian American advocate and founder of Penn Asian Senior Services, has died at 73
After struggling to find home care for her own ailing mother, she established a home health-care service that has grown to serve hundreds of Asian senior citizens and others in East Oak Lane.
Im Ja Choi, 73, of Blue Bell, a celebrated advocate for Asian American seniors and founder and chief executive officer emeritus of the Penn Asian Senior Services nonprofit, died Wednesday, June 22, of lung cancer at a hospital in South Korea.
A top-producing real estate agent and financial services senior executive in the 1980s and ’90s, Ms. Choi abandoned those careers and founded Penn Asian Senior Services in 2004, she said online, “to support the well-being of Asian American seniors who are disadvantaged by language and cultural barriers.”
She was spurred to action in 2002 when she was unable to find a Korean-speaking home health-care aide to assist her ailing mother, Boonam Park, who did not speak English or eat American food. “I could not send her to a nursing home,” Ms. Choi told the Daily News in 2011. “I had no other choice than to take care of her, to bring her home.”
It took Ms. Choi eight months to find a home aide who spoke Korean and could relate to her mother. That experience — and the desperate stories she heard from other caregivers — led her to create an agency that provides personal home care and related homemaking services in nearly two dozen languages to hundreds of Asian senior citizens and others.
She also opened an adult day-care center for immigrants with language and cultural barriers, a state-licensed vocational school for entry-level Asian health-care workers, and a seniors community center, all in East Oak Lane, where Penn Asian Senior Services is based. “Who wants to stay at home? No one,” Ms. Choi told the Daily News when the adult day-care center opened in 2014.
“I consider this job a privilege,” Ms. Choi told Money.com in 2014. “When you have a dream, you somehow make it come true. Now I feel like I am doing the things that I want to do.”
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Ms. Choi oversaw the nonprofit’s fund-raising efforts and strategic planning. She earned grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and other groups, and forged partnerships with Montgomery County Community College, the Alzheimer’s Association, the Pennsylvania Department of Aging, the Asian American Women’s Coalition, the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging, and Encore.org.
One of the Philadelphia Business Journal’s 2010 Women of Distinction, she won the 2011 Robert Wood Johnson Community Health Leader Award and the 2013 Ellis Island Medal of Honor from the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations.
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“Im Ja’s visionary leadership was matched by care, kindness and a heart for loved ones and her community,” Ken Yang, the CEO at Penn Asian Senior Services, said in a tribute.
Ms. Choi served on the Pennsylvania Cultural Diversity Advisory Council, the board of visitors for Temple University’s health professions program, and was named a 2014 Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania by the governor for her “extraordinary service and contributions to the Commonwealth.”
She gave the commencement speech at Penn State Abington in the fall of 2014, and one of her favorite axioms was: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Lorina Marshall-Blake, president of the Independence Blue Cross Foundation, said in a 2013 letter to the editor of The Inquirer: “Our region needs more health visionaries like Im Ja Choi.”
Born July 18, 1948, in Seoul, South Korea, Im Ja Park studied literature, performed in plays, and graduated from Korea University in Seoul. She came to the United States in 1971, worked in California, and moved to Philadelphia a few years later after marrying childhood friend Jung Choi.
They lived in Blue Bell, had son Ben and daughter Sara, and she earned a master’s degree in organizational dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania. She “literally trailblazed the American dream with distinction and passion,” a colleague told the Philadelphia Business Journal in 2010.
Away from work, Ms. Choi played golf and was a seamstress who made her own alterations and an occasional dress or jacket. She was a freethinking feminist, vice president of the Montgomery County chapter of the National Organization for Women in the 1980s, and active in the county’s Republican Party.
She traveled and enjoyed the arts. While focused on her work, she also found time for her husband, children, and three grandchildren. “She was always looking for ways to make an impact on the community,” her daughter said. “But if there was anything we needed, she made it happen.”
Ms. Choi was diagnosed with cancer in 2019. “The mission and sense of purpose that she put into action at [Penn Asian Senior Services] continues, and we continue to do our best to make her proud each day,” Yang, the CEO, said.
“Helping others,” her daughter said, “was her calling.”
In addition to her husband, children, and grandchildren, Ms. Choi is survived by four sisters, two brothers, and other relatives.
A celebration of her life is scheduled for 3 p.m. Saturday, July 16, at the Evergreen Center, 6926 Old York Rd., Philadelphia, Pa. 19126.
Donations in her name may be made to Penn Asian Senior Services, 6926 Old York Rd., Philadelphia, Pa. 19126.