Signature Events
Alliances are written by governments. They are sustained by people who know one another.
Once a year in New York, on a fairway in the fall, in a boardroom in Nashville, The Korea Society puts the people who carry the U.S.–Korea relationship in the same room. What happens there is not ceremony. It is infrastructure.
Trust is built in the room, not on paper.
Treaties are negotiated. Trade agreements are signed. But the relationship between the United States and Korea has always run on something no document can create: leaders who trust each other enough to pick up the phone.
For nearly seventy years, The Korea Society has been where that trust is formed. Our signature events convene the people who shape this partnership — executives and ambassadors, artists and scholars, first-generation founders and fourth-generation Americans — and give them reason to know one another before the moment they need to.
We convene across government, business, civil society, academia, generations, sectors, and regions. When the relationship is strong, these gatherings compound it. When the relationship is tested, they are what holds.
Four rooms. One relationship.
From a flagship gala to the fairway to America's newest Korea communities, each gathering builds trust in a different register.
Signature Event
Van Fleet Award & Annual Gala
The highest honor in the U.S.–Korea relationship, presented in New York each fall.
Named for General James A. Van Fleet, our founder, the Van Fleet Award recognizes the individuals and institutions who have most advanced the partnership between our two nations. Its recipients are heads of state, industry leaders, and cultural figures whose work has changed what the two countries can accomplish together. The Annual Gala that surrounds it is the year's convening moment: an evening where policy, commerce, and culture sit at the same tables, and where the alliance is celebrated in front of the people with the standing to advance it.
Signature Event
Van Fleet Memorial Golf Tournament
Thirty-five years of conversations that don't happen in conference rooms.
Some relationships are built on a stage. Others are built over five hours, eighteen holes, and no agenda. For more than three decades, our tournament has given American and Korean leaders the rarest thing in a busy calendar: unstructured time together. The result is a quieter kind of diplomacy. Channels open here that are still open years later, when they are needed most.
Regional Engagement
Regional Partnerships
The alliance no longer lives only in Washington and Seoul.
Korean investment is reshaping communities in Tennessee, Georgia, and across the American South — places where a Korean corporate presence is new, and where local understanding has not yet caught up with local economic stakes. We go there. We build the relationships with mayors, chambers, universities, and community leaders that turn investment into partnership. That groundwork is not visible on an ordinary day. It is decisive on a difficult one, when a single misunderstanding can put billions of dollars and years of goodwill at risk.
Community
Membership & Community
Not an audience. A standing network.
Our individual and corporate members are the connective tissue of everything above. They fill the rooms, open the doors, mentor the next generation into the relationship, and sustain the programming that runs all year long. Membership is how a one-night connection becomes a decade-long collaboration — and how the alliance passes from the generation that built it to the generation that will carry it.
Membership Events·Individual Membership·Corporate Membership
Institutions keep the alliance official. People keep it alive. Our charge is to make sure they know each other before the moment they need to.
The Korea Society · New York · Est. 1957
Take your seat at the table.
Our signature events are made possible by members, sponsors, and partners who understand that the U.S.–Korea relationship is too consequential to leave to chance.