BGF Retail, '2023 Child Safety Citizen Award' Ceremony

BGF Retail announced on the 10th that it held the ‘2023 BGF Child Safety Citizen Award’ ceremony to honor citizen heroes who contributed to child safety activities throughout this year.

The BGF Child Safety Citizen Award was established in 2019 to discover and reward citizens who have become social role models by protecting children’s safety from various accidents and dangers, and to contribute to creating a culture of child safety by widely publicizing their good deeds through the awards.

At the '2023 BGF Child Safety Citizen Awards' ceremony held on the 8th at the BGF Retail headquarters in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, award recipient Na Byung-geon, the Padong Project team, and related personnel are taking a commemorative photo.
[Photo by BGF Retail]

This year’s citizen heroes were Mr. Na Byung-geon, who rescued a missing child on the highway, and the social innovation project team ‘Padong,’ which is actively conducting campaigns on long-term missing children. Each received a certificate, a plaque, and a prize money of 5 million KRW.

Mr. Na Byung-geon rescued a barefoot child who was dangerously running around near the Daejeon Tollgate on the highway. Despite the risky situation that could have led to a serious accident, he evacuated the child to a safe place and handed them over to the police, safely returning the child to their family. This incident gained widespread attention and admiration after being featured on the traffic accident-specialized YouTube channel ‘Han Moon-cheol TV.’

Padong is a university student social innovation project team conducting various campaigns to raise awareness among the MZ generation about long-term missing children. Since 2021, they have collaborated with BGF Retail on the long-term missing children search campaign ‘CU SOON.’ Last year, based on Padong’s idea, instead of a CU brand 10th anniversary celebration advertisement, they ran subway station ads containing information about long-term missing children, attracting significant attention.

In addition to the Child Safety Citizen Award, BGF Retail has been continuously conducting activities to protect child safety by extensively utilizing its nationwide offline network of over 17,000 stores to build and expand a child safety network. A representative activity is the child missing prevention system ‘iCU,’ which safely protects lost children (including dementia patients and people with developmental disabilities) at CU stores and connects them to the police and their families. Since its introduction in 2017, a total of about 160 children and others have safely returned to their families through iCU. Approximately 69% of reported cases involved children who lost their guardians, demonstrating CU’s crucial role in protecting the golden time for missing children.

BGF Retail CEO Min Seung-bae stated, “BGF Retail will continue to contribute to building social safety infrastructure and fulfill its role as a ‘good friend to customers and society.’”

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