I was delighted to host Eunhee Park at a speech last week to graduate students. Eunhee has spoken at the Asia Liberty Forum, the Oslo Freedom Forum, given a TEDx Talk, and also won local English speech contests. She is the kind of speaker who is ready to a thoughtful speech, to answer any questions, and to even ask questions of the audience.
Some audiences aren't ready for a speaker like her ready to engage them! Many audiences just want to passively listen. I gave a speech to them about a month ago, then invited Eunhee to follow up.
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Nothing compares to TNKR
A few years ago, when high school students applied to volunteer with TNKR, I was like the old neighbor yelling, "You kids get out of my yard!" After experiencing enough high school kids expecting to get a volunteer certificate for volunteering for a few hours then never contacting us again, I wrote them off. We were trying to build an organization, so young people with such short-term thinking were not going to fit in our plans.
Everything changed in 2018. Two high school kids came to me, asking if they could tutor North Korean refugees. As I do with high school kids (and increasingly with adults), I challenged them to get involved in other ways first. TNKR needs to grow as an organization, so having people pop-up then disappear wasn't going to help us become a sustainable organization.
The two youngsters--Eugene and Jun--kept coming back, probably trying to prove they weren't like other popup volunteers. They kept coming up with ideas about how to help, then finally they established the TNKR Global High School Union! Not only did they bring more people with them, and even the moms started getting involved!
Every meeting with them is uplifting. A few days ago we met with some of the moms to plan for 2021.
It was encouraging hearing the wonderful things they were saying about TNKR, about the impact it has had on their children. Most of all, they have made it clear to us that this is not a one-time project, that they want to keep it going, that there is a clear plan of succession in the leadership. They made it clear: "Nothing compares with TNKR."
A big part of it seems to be that we didn't make it easy on their children, instead expecting them to raise their level. As a result of them, we have been able to raise our level of engagement with high school volunteers, making TNKR a stronger organization. Now we plan our activities with the TNKR GHSU youngsters in mind, thinking about ways to have them involved.
I am looking forward to the day they say we are giving them too many opportunities, which would take us back full circle to "you kids, get out of my yard!"
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New expectations for adult volunteers
TNKR will probably be setting up a formal internship program within the next few months. It will be more likely to happen when we have someone take charge of running it.
In the meantime, we are willing to accept TNKR members as volunteers.
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South Korean supporters
We met with a TNKR fan who will be getting more involved with TNKR. He will be having an important role that will help further boost our transparency. He works with a really huge company, our budget could fit within his organization's budget without anyone even noticing us. However, he respects what we are doing, and in particular he is inspired by the American co-founder engaging with North Korean refugees.
We recently had a Korean business professional (not pictured) visit our office, he said he felt sad when he realized that our office was so humble. He knows about the professional backgrounds of the co-founders, he thinks we should be working in a huge office with a full staff ready to assist us. I told him: Eunkoo and I have both worked at huge offices, and we absolutely agree with him. So he needs to get to work making it happen!
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TEDx Talker
A new TNKR student recently gave a TEDx Talk. It is always delightful when such fluent North Korean refugee English speakers still believe that TNKR is worthy of them joining. When refugees get to a certain level of English, they have so many people chasing them, trying to get them into their activities or programs. In our case, they come looking for us.
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Media Strategy? What Media Strategy?
I occasionally get asked what is TNKR's media strategy. People don't believe me when I say we don't have one, that we don't have a media list. It seems that our "strategy" is having good results.
The weekend before, we were featured by South Korea's Ministry of Unification.
This past weekend, it was the BBC.
A few days ago, we had a team of researchers interview the co-founders.
And over the weekend, I did a long online interview with the podcast Just Interesting People.
