Olympian Mirai Nagasu Teams with Crowdfund Initiative to Help Parents' Restaurant Struggling in Pandemic — & Feed the Community

It’s been almost 20 years since Ikuko and Kiyoto Nagasu took over Sushi Kiyosuzu in Arcadia, California, and their daughter Mirai Nagasu is no longer the little girl falling asleep on a yoga mat in the storage room after school.

(“With how expensive my skating was, we didn’t have the money for a babysitter,” Mirai notes. Still, what better way to learn to sleep through anything than learning to sleep through people popping in for a container or utensil.)

Now 27, Mirai is a former national figure skating champion and two-time Olympian, with a bronze medal in team figure skating from the 2018 Winter Games and a history-making triple axel to count among her many victories.

Those headline-grabbing skills have been put to unexpected use during the novel coronavirus pandemic that has shuttered numerous businesses and stranded millions of workers.

After Mirai learned that Kiyosuzu was struggling during the shutdown (“My parents try to stay really strong for me”), she helped connect her parents with the Washington, D.C.-based Power of 10 — a fundraising initiative to support restaurants who in turn use their business to feed first responders, non-profits and other community members.

“My whole career has been about me and my goals and my dreams, and then to be able to take my fame gained in my skating and put it toward my parents and to try to get more awareness for Power of 10 so we can help other restaurants in the area means so much to me,” Mirai tells PEOPLE.

The math is appealingly simple: With donations as small as $10, a restaurant will be able to pay for both employees and meal costs, with $10,000 funding a week of 1,000 meals and 10 full-time workers.

Power of 10 was started by D.C. chef Erik Bruner-Yang in late March. Mirai — who was connected to Bruner-Yang by a mutual friend — helped them expand to their first Los Angeles-area restaurant.

Starting this week, Kiyosuzu began delivering hundreds of meals and Mirai says the plan is to use Power of 10’s funding for the month and to look at supporting other L.A. restaurants.

View this post on Instagram A huge thank you to @vossworld for donating 1,000 waters to our @powerof10initiative so our healthcare workers don’t go thirsty. We’ve raised $10k in the last two days which means we can sustain a restaurant for another week. My parents have never participated in something as big as this and I think you can tell from the smiles on their faces that they’re loving it. Thank you all so much! Please keep spreading the word! (And in case you were wondering, you’re looking at some yummy looking salmon bowls) #beatcovid19

A post shared by Mirai Nagasu (@mirainagasu) on Apr 24, 2020 at 5:36pm PDT

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“Being able to be their voice is something that’s really important to me,” Mirai says of her mom and dad, who had long been comfortable keeping their restaurant separate from the spotlight on her skating.

Kiyosuzu — that is, Mirai’s parents with some help — has so far delivered meals to the local Foothill Unity Center as well as to the Asian Youth Center and the Methodist Hospital Foundation, Mirai says.

Bruner-Yang, the Power of 10 founder, says his idea started out as pure economics. A restauranteur himself (he owns multiple restaurants in D.C., two of which are still open during the pandemic), he knows the magnifying power of money — even a single bill.

“One dollar that stays in your community impacts several people,” he says. “The more money you can keep in your community, the more impact it has. Your one donation, even if you’re donating one $10 meal, happens to touch a lot of people.”

Kiyosuzu’s funding came from a large single donation, Bruner-Yang says.

In total, more than $200,000 has been raised through Power of 10 for eight restaurants and more than 15,000 meals have been served.

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“I’ve always believed in full circle,” Bruner-Yang says, adding, “Some days we raise money and some days we don’t. But every day we make the food, and I think it’s awesome.” (Mirai, he notes, “has been really good at helping fundraise.”)

The future of life in the pandemic, or after, is hard to predict. But Bruner-Yang says he wants to continue to provide help through Power of 10, crisis or no.

“This is obviously a major wakeup call of how unstable a lot of people’s economic situations is, and hopefully Power of 10 can be a longterm safety net. … I don’t think the mission ends,” he says.

Says Mirai: “It feels really nice to be doing something for humanity, because we all need a little spark of hope right now.”