Two volunteer teachers from KI House, Ms. Mikyung Han and Mijeong Yoo, were finalists of the 2020 Yuseong-Gu Untact Ignite, an  event celebrating inspiring stories of volunteers helping their communities.

The 2020 Yuseong-Gu Untact Ignite called for the most touching and poignant accounts from volunteers across Daejeon. The Yuseong-Gu Volunteer Center (YSVC) accepted submissions of stories describing volunteers’ personal, communal, or organizational impact through their work. The name “Ignite” was chosen to highlight the mission to spur a positive impact on the community through these stories. The center selected the final ten teams from the submissions in the preliminary rounds and conducted three rounds of orientation and speech workshop sessions. On November 14, the final competition and the award ceremony was held at KSEEK Studio, where the finalists presented their stories in front of an online audience. A panel of five professionals, ten finalists, and 300 online judges decided the winners of the grand and excellence prizes. 

A retired teacher of 30 years, Ms. Han presented the story of her local and global impact, by both teaching Korean to international students at KI House and by working as a member of the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) in Mongolia. She recounted her role in teaching Korean in a completely different environment and enthusiastically acclimating to the Mongolian culture.

Ms. Yoo described her experience of interacting with students as a Korean teacher since 2016 at KI House, with an inspiring story that highlighted the value of volunteer work for language learning. Ms. Yoo helped her students not only linguistically but in their personal lives, such as resolving a housing conflict, and has stayed in contact with many of them due to the strong, nearly familial bond she formed over the years. 

Both finalists expressed, “[the experience] was nerve-wrecking and took a lot of work, but it was fulfilling to inform others about the work of our volunteer organizations.” Read more about their stories in this interview.

A total of four million KRW was awarded to the finalists, with the grand prize winner receiving one million KRW.

KI House operates under ISSS and offers free one-on-one Korean classes for international students taught by volunteer teachers. The center will also offer specialized TOPIK preparation classes during the upcoming winter break. Furthermore, it is looking for international students to enter the annual Korean Speech Contest with three-minute videos under the theme of “A [___] that inspired me”. The deadline for entries is November 27.