For most of the last century, South Korea was the country that needed help. UNICEF started working there in 1948, and after the Korean War it spent 45 years sending medicine, nutrition, and clean-water support to Korean kids and their mothers. Then, in 1994, Korea became the first country in the world to go from receiving UNICEF aid to donating it.

Korea is where my family is from, and I just finished serving in the Korean Army. Now I’m a junior at Emory, and I think a lot about what my country owes to the people who helped it stand up. This fundraiser is my small way of paying that forward.

UNICEF works in 190 countries. In 2024 alone, it reached 55 million people with safe drinking water and 34 million children with screening and treatment for severe malnutrition. A little goes a long way:

$1 gives one child safe water for more than two months

$10 supplies 27 packets of therapeutic food for a severely malnourished child

$25 provides 4 fleece blankets for kids in emergencies

My goal is $300 by November 1. Donations go straight to UNICEF USA through GoFundMe’s charity program; nothing passes through me. If $10 is what you’ve got, that’s 27 packets of food a child wouldn’t get otherwise. Thank you, and I’ll post updates here as we go.