Seoul YWCA

Last year, the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission applied for extending the life of the nuclear reactor up to 2022. The reactor has been working since 1983 which was designed to run for 30 years and its lifespan was already over 4 years ago. The Seoul Administrative Court  concluded that the Wolseong-1 nuclear reactor need to put to a stop. Now the commission is preparing for appeal. Against the commission's decision, 2,167 civic activists filed a suit protesting it. Seoul YWCA joined the protest on 17th Feb, urging not to discuss further argument on court's verdict. Actually today(22th Feb, 2017) is the last day the commission can appeal. We, Seoul YWCA members believe the commission must not appeal so that the hazardous reactor can be removed as soon as possible.

Gangnam Youth Center conducted a volunteering program that grows youth's sense of community and sharing for middle and high school students enjoying their winter vacation. The center facilitated for the youth to visit nursing home, mentoring children in need. The participants had a great time by communicating the elderly and the kids learning about community development. Nowon Women's Resources Development Center hosted a job fair with a company, Front-runner. The Front-runner is specialized in growing afterschool instructors, this time, it was mainly about hiring software coding programmer. The Front-runner introduced an outlook of SW coding sector and related training sessions. The participants had been offered job interviews and free training classes.

      We would like to introduce a representative program Seoul YWCA is doing to empower youth women in detention home. It's called "Book Mentoring Project" that sending humanistic or literary books to female youngers trained in detention home every month with warm-hearted hand-written letter. This month, Korea Starbucks staffs participated in packing the books and wrote kind letters for this program. We hope the books will be sent to our friends can be a life-changing mentor and contribute to thinking about their future after their time in the detention home. If you want to support this program, please contact here: i-friend @seoulywca.or.kr

  On the Feb 7th, even the freezing cold weather couldn't block these women to voice out on anti-nuclear power plant in both Korea and the world.     The continuous domestic earthquake news makes us more nervous and threatens people's safety near the nuclear power plants and throughout the country. This is why Seoul YWCA has never stopped the campaign.   Despite the cold weather, many people in Myeongdong supported the "Goodbye Nuclear Power Plants" campaign. We always tremendously feel thankful for them.  

  Seoul YWCA started the new year with volunteering program with Myanmar Y-teens. Twenty six Korean college students selected all over the Korea implement volunteering service in Thanlyn township near Yangon for Jan 11th~22th.   They went to Su Taung Pyae elementary school and taught 4th~6 grade 270 students art, science, hygiene, music. Teaching and learning was not only program, they but also prepared for cultural exchange program by practicing singing, k-pop dancing, Taekwndo performance.     For ten days, Korean volunteers had learned about sharing, giving, mingling with new people. Hope they can take actions to share what they learn from the program in the future.

An intensely frozen day, 27th Dec. Seoul YWCA  conducted a training session for Y-VM volunteers. Six out of eight had attended, and they learned about intellectual developmental disabilities. They would be a volunteer for various people who has disabilities and help their life skill for them to be included within the community in United Kingdom.       Each of them will be sent the the UK one by one in a different project, but most of them will face new environment in a foreign country and someone who has diverse difficulties. In order to prepare for the project Y-VM volunteers had this chance to get a preliminary training. In the first session, they listened to a lecture regarding  intellectual developmental disabilities and met with 17-year-old intellectual disability students to get to know each other.   The third session was to self- experience being a handicapped person. Each of us got a test paper looked like above. If you ref...

Do you remember the Starbucks funded Youth Dream Factory? There were second event called "Creative Job Talk Concert" linked to the Youth Dream factory on December 17th. About 50 high school students got together and met with three successful entrepreneurs. One of them is Mr. Shim Yong Hwan, who is the CEO of N History Research Institute. He advised all of us are considerable individual composing of current society, so it's important to have critical thinking and raise social issues' awareness through story of poet of resistance, Yoon Dong Ju in Japanese colonial era in Korea. The students attended had a great time with the speakers and got to think of what kind of job they are dreaming for the future. SeoulYWCA felt also rewarding to make this event happen! We hope the students(mainly Y-teens) keep dreaming and achieving what they want with Seoul YWCA!