Kalos Agathos Foundation

HISTORY - The Life and Legacy of Bruce Hopping

While the Kalos Kagathos Foundation was officially created in 1968, its predecessor organization, the New Jersey Committee began in 1953 when, after the death of his father, Founding Director Bruce Hopping used his inheritance to create a foundation that would promote swimming as an ideal form of exercise.

The New Jersey Committee

For the next 15 years, Director Hopping worked through the New Jersey Committee, sponsoring aquatic sport forums and competitions, as well as commissioning works of art to be given as the foremost prestigious awards and honors in the realms of amateur competitive swimming and diving. Many of these are now housed at the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Since its inception, the foundation championed aquatic sports as ideal, beneficial, easily-accessible forms of exercise for maintaining physical fitness and self- respect, while also using art to communicate this value and importance to others.

In 1961, Director Hopping relocated from Maplewood, New Jersey to Laguna Beach, California. Already by that time, Laguna Beach was well- established as an international travel destination devoted to the arts and various ocean sports like surfing, bodyboarding, and rowing. Throughout the 1960s, the activities of the New Jersey Committee broadened in scope to include these other forms of aquatic sports, surfing foremost among them, while also actively endorsing projects to support the visual and performing arts and protect the local Laguna Beach ocean ecology.

1968 - The Kalos Kagathos Foundation

A breakthrough moment occurred in 1968 when Director Hopping met Dr. Ted Brunner, Chair of the Classics Department at the University of California-Irvine. After explaining the activities of his foundation to Dr. Brunner as helping young people develop self-respect and respect for others through the Arts, Aquatic Sports, and Environmental Awareness, Dr. Brunner introduced Hopping to the ancient Greek educational concept of Kalos Kagathos, or Physical Distinction and Nobility of Mind.

A Positive Influence

In addition to commissioning numerous awards, and sponsoring forums and competitions worldwide for aquatic sports, the Kalos Kagathos foundation also began at this time to lead the first of dozens of swim, surf, dive, and water polo teams around the world for cultural exchanges in which high-school students stayed with members of different host nations. Through this unique style of youth sports diplomacy, of which Director Hopping was an early pioneer, the foundation sponsored exchanges to nearly 50 countries on every continent except Antarctica, while impacting thousands of kids’ lives and inspiring them to become better persons as well as using art and cultural exchanges to promote aquatic sports.

The Kalos Kagathos Foundation also supported the visual, performing, and literary arts from the 1960s onward, by conceiving of and administering cultural exchanges, endowing grants and awards, and encouraging young people to pursue art as a way of communicating meaning and value in people’s lives. In so doing, the foundation helped thousands of people understand and appreciate themselves in relation to their neighbors and the world around them, especially in and around Laguna Beach, where the foundation was a driving force in the art community for more than 50 years. The foundation also was active at the forefront of environmental justice during these 50 years, by advocating for and endowing scientific research to protect park space and preserve the health of our oceans.

photo by SCOTT BRASHIER

A Champion of Life

From 1968-2018, Director Hopping worked tirelessly through the Kalos Kagathos Foundation to promote arts, aquatic sports, and environmental awareness. He died one day after the 50th anniversary of the Kalos Kagathos Foundation’s incorporation in the state of California. His
Foundation was recognized internationally, nationally, at the state, county, and city levels for numerous contributions in each of the last seven decades.

A Foundation for Good

Numerous non-profits promote arts, aquatic sports, and environmental awareness, but none promotes all three together as the Kalos Agathos
Foundation does. The Kalos Agathos Foundation is unique in how it accomplishes its goals, by focusing on personal development and relationship of self to the greater community and the natural environment. The dynamic core philosophy of Kalos Agathos, physical distinction and nobility of mind, allows us to serve diverse purposes while also remaining true to our universal aim of helping people develop self-respect, respect for others, and for the natural world around them. The foundation fills the need of making the world a better place by instilling individuals with an enhanced sense of self-worth and community.

For seven decades the Kalos Kagathos Foundation (and before its progenitor the New Jersey Committee) was at the forefront of improving the lives of others through the arts, grants, cultural exchanges, environmental awareness, and more. Director Hopping’s highly publicized personal life, including his WW II experience floating on a raft in the Pacific Ocean after his plane went down, aboard a mine-sweeper ship in the Pacific Ocean during the Korean War, as well as his subsequent personal and financial investment in the New Jersey Committee and Kalos Kagathos Foundation for
seven consecutive decades, gives us a vast network of connections and provides solid bedrock for future growth.