Serving Multicultural Families and Children in Korea

As the number of foreign residents in Korea increases rapidly and the nation transforms into a multicultural society, the importance of social integration, in which people from all kinds of backgrounds such as race, religion, language, and culture live in harmony, is now recognized more strongly than ever.

To assist multicultural families, Pearl S. Buck Foundation Korea (PSBFK) implemented several programs and projects over the course of the past year. One such project was “Finding Hidden Planet,” helping multicultural adolescents overcome vulnerable economic and social conditions, increasing their self-esteem, recognizing their uniqueness as a strength, and discovering potential capabilities. This was achieved through relationship building, learning activities, bicultural exploration during a visit to Vietnam, and youth mentor training. This program was an extension of PSBFK’s successful “Motherland Tour” program which has operated since 2008.

PSBFK’s most successful project was its multicultural family communication improvement project, which aimed to strengthen the parenting capacity of married immigrant women to create a healthy family environment. This program included in-depth group counseling as well as individual counseling geared toward self-understanding and self-care of married immigrant women facing stressful relationships with their spouses and children due to cultural differences and limitations in language communication.

Though the school-age population keeps declining nationwide, the number of children from multicultural families continues to rise, and the composition of student populations is diversifying. Therefore, PSBFK has focused on supporting the children and youth from multicultural families with the aim to establish a way to support them in a more comprehensive way.

PSBFK plans to take the lead in social interest and active support for ‘healthy growth and independence’ for multicultural youth. Therefore, it will be very important to further expand and develop programs and projects that serve them. First, scholarship support aims to help multicultural youth grow up as future talents of a society by supporting activities such as scholarships and career development. In particular, the ‘Future Talent Scholarship’ is to discover and support students with outstanding academic performance and special talents.

Furthermore, a wide range of psycho-social support is being provided to help multicultural youth establish a healthy bicultural identity. Ultimately, PSBFK will seek more intensive and systematic ways to support the rapidly increasing number of multicultural youth, allowing PSBFK to re-evaluate its capabilities, encourage multicultural youth and families, and thereby contribute to social integration.