Gwangju Nam-gu Youths Win Grand Prize as 'Uri Maeul Avengers'

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Park Jin-hyung] The Nam-gu Youth Center in Gwangju Metropolitan City won the grand prize in the ‘2022 Youth After-School Academy Best Practices’ contest hosted by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.

This was because the "Our Village Avengers Project," which views problems occurring throughout the village from the perspective of youth and solves them through social participation activities such as field surveys and experiments, received high praise.

According to Nam-gu on the 16th, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family conducted a contest targeting after-school academy operating institutions to discover best practices of after-school academies that provide learning and counseling support to youth in need of after-school care, and to help youth’s self-directed growth.

The contest was held in four categories: software, social issues, curriculum linkage, and general sections, and the Nam-gu Youth Center won the grand prize in the social issues category.

The Nam-gu Youth Center operated the Our Village Avengers Project, where 37 youths pondered local issues together with their peers and sought solutions.

From March to August this year, local youths participated in an experimental project to develop problem-solving skills through social participation activities, dividing into teams such as the space improvement team, traffic environment improvement team, and problem-solving activity team in cooperation with the partner organization Gonghana Cooperative, actively carrying out activities.

The neighborhood issues reflected through their perspective included creating spaces to increase users of the youth center, methods for guiding no-smoking zones around the youth center and parks, and improvements to youth ID card functions and automatic registration.

To solve these issues, local youths conducted field surveys and experiments, directly operated a youth caf?, wrote proposals for improving youth ID card functions, and produced no-smoking zone guide signs they designed themselves.

A Nam-gu official stated, “Thanks to the differentiated after-school program that allowed youths to grow as social agents through problem-solving activities, we were able to receive the grand prize,” adding, “It was a valuable time that greatly helped in establishing identity and self-formation through social interaction.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.