2024
Dec 31st
Jeju A*** Children's Home Donation
Returning to Jeju A*** Children's Home at the end of another year felt different from my earlier donations. What had initially begun as an effort to share things I could spare had gradually become an opportunity to reconsider what giving actually meant. I was no longer particularly interested in how much I could collect or how many items I could deliver. I was more concerned with whether what I offered was genuinely useful, and whether I had taken enough time to consider the people receiving it.
I had also begun questioning the imbalance inherent in donation itself. The person giving often decides what to offer, when to offer it, and how the gesture should be understood, while the recipient has comparatively little say. I wondered how easily generosity could become another expression of privilege when it was guided more by the giver's intentions than the recipient's preferences.
As the year ended, I realised that I did not want generosity to be measured by the gratitude it received. I wanted to learn how to give without expecting a particular response, and more importantly, how to listen before deciding what was worth giving. Perhaps the most meaningful change since my first donation was not in what I had contributed, but in how much less certain I had become that good intentions alone were enough.
December 28th–29th
Coal Briquette Volunteering
For two days, I helped carry coal briquettes from a truck up a steep hill to a home. The task was straightforward, but the repetition made it unexpectedly exhausting. Each trip followed the same route, and the hill seemed to grow steeper with every load. I found myself counting how many briquettes remained, measuring progress by how much closer we were to finishing.
Yet I began to think about the difference between experiencing physical exhaustion temporarily and having it woven into everyday life. For me, the hill was an inconvenience I would leave behind after two days. For the people living there, its steepness was a permanent feature of their surroundings. I had always thought of access in terms of whether something was available, but here, I began to recognise that availability meant little without the means to reach it.
What stayed with me was how something as ordinary as the distance between a road and a front door could shape someone's daily experience. Inequality was not always visible in what people owned or earned. Sometimes, it was embedded in the geography of their lives, in the extra effort required to accomplish what others barely noticed. By the end, I was thinking less about the weight of the briquettes and more about the invisible weight of circumstances that made the same task so different from one household to another.
December 20th
Expansion of the Zoom Online Teaching Programme
As our Zoom English lessons continued, I began noticing that students often needed help with more than language itself. Questions about vocabulary gradually became questions about mathematics, science, and other school subjects. Rather than limiting our sessions to English, we decided to expand the programme to offer subject-specific academic support, particularly for younger students who needed additional guidance with their schoolwork.
This shift made me reconsider what educational access actually meant. I had initially approached teaching through the skills I could offer, assuming that improving English proficiency was the most useful contribution I could make. Yet the students' questions revealed needs I had not anticipated. I began to understand that meaningful teaching required flexibility, not simply following a curriculum I had prepared, but allowing students' difficulties and interests to shape what we taught.
What began as an English programme was gradually becoming a broader space for learning. I realised that expanding an initiative did not necessarily mean reaching more people or offering more lessons. Sometimes, it meant listening more carefully to those already participating and being willing to change the programme around them. I was learning to measure progress not by how closely we followed our original plans, but by how well those plans could evolve.
December 10th
Donation to World Vision Zambia
This year, I prepared my Christmas package for C******a and his friends earlier, hoping it would arrive in Zambia before December 25th. Having sent a similar package the previous year, I had become more conscious of the practical details involved. Choosing gifts was only one part of the process. Packaging, international shipping, and delivery times all required planning, particularly when the destination was thousands of miles away.
What interested me most was how differently time could be experienced across that distance. For me, Christmas was a fixed date on the calendar, surrounded by familiar traditions and anticipation. Yet sending something overseas meant accounting for circumstances beyond my immediate control. A delay that might seem insignificant to me could mean the difference between a Christmas present and an ordinary parcel arriving in January. I began to appreciate that thoughtfulness was not always expressed through grand gestures, but through the less visible effort of anticipating such details.
I had previously associated generosity with spontaneity, the impulse to share something because I wanted to. This experience made me appreciate a more subtle form of care, one that required preparation, patience, and responsibility long after the initial enthusiasm had passed. I realised that good intentions were only the beginning; following through on them, even in the smallest practical details, was what gave them substance.
December 1st
Donation to Y****** Children's Home
As the year drew to a close, we at common&good organised another donation to Y******** Children's Home. Having worked with children's homes on several occasions, we had begun to reflect on the difference between occasional generosity and sustained commitment. While individual donations could provide immediate comfort, we increasingly recognised the importance of consistency, particularly in a world where public attention and charitable contributions often fluctuate with seasons and occasions.
This experience brought us back to a question that had gradually shaped our work: what makes an act of giving genuinely meaningful? We realised that its significance could not be measured solely by the quantity or monetary value of what was donated. Nor could we assume that our intentions necessarily corresponded to what others wanted or needed. Meaningful contribution required attentiveness, humility, and a willingness to listen rather than presume.
As we continued our work, we became less interested in treating each donation as an isolated achievement and more concerned with the relationships and responsibilities that connected them. We wanted common&good to represent not simply a series of charitable gestures, but a continuing commitment to recognising others as members of the same community. Perhaps the purpose of giving was never to establish a distinction between those who give and those who receive, but to make that distinction matter a little less.
October 25th
Beginning of Zoom English Lessons
Expanding the Teaching Team
As my library English lessons continued, I began receiving requests for additional classes from children who could not attend in person. To make the lessons more accessible, I started offering sessions over Zoom, hoping that distance and scheduling would no longer determine who could participate. What began as a small extension of my library volunteering gradually developed into a more regular teaching commitment.
As demand grew, I realised that I could no longer accommodate every request on my own. I invited another member of the common&good team to join me, expanding our teaching team from one person to two. Although modest, this was my first experience of turning an individual commitment into a shared responsibility. It required us to coordinate schedules, divide lessons, and think more carefully about how to maintain consistency across different students.
What stayed with me was how quickly the limitations of working alone had become apparent. I had initially measured my contribution by the hours I personally spent teaching, but I began to understand that expanding access sometimes meant stepping away from the idea that I had to do everything myself. Bringing another person into the project did not diminish my involvement. It allowed something that had depended entirely on my availability to begin growing beyond it.
September 7th
Beginning of Library English Teaching
On September 7th, I began volunteering to teach English at a local library. Having grown up speaking both Korean and English, I had often taken for granted how naturally I could move between the two languages. Yet as I sat with the children, explaining unfamiliar words and helping them form sentences, I began to recognise how intimidating a language could feel when every word required conscious effort.
What surprised me was how differently each child approached learning. Some were eager to speak, even when they made mistakes, while others hesitated despite knowing the answers. I gradually realised that teaching was not simply about explaining something clearly. It was about understanding why an explanation might make sense to one person but not another, and finding the patience to approach the same idea differently. Sometimes, the most important progress was not a correctly constructed sentence, but a child becoming willing to attempt one.
I had begun volunteering because I thought my familiarity with English was something I could share. Instead, I found myself learning how little knowing a subject necessarily meant knowing how to teach it. The experience challenged me to become a more attentive listener, to resist the temptation to supply answers too quickly, and to recognise that confidence often had to develop before fluency could follow. I began to see education less as the transfer of knowledge and more as the gradual creation of space for someone to discover what they were capable of expressing.
June 23rd
Jeju S*** CathedralㅣBook and Toy Donation
When Jeju S*** Cathedral requested donations of used books and toys, I reached out to fellow common&good members and people in our community to organise a collective donation. Rather than purchasing anything new, we began looking through our homes for belongings we no longer used. Books that had sat untouched on shelves, toys we had outgrown, and things we had almost forgotten about gradually came together into a collection far larger than anything I could have gathered alone.
What struck me was how little each person had to contribute for our collective efforts to amount to something meaningful. A few books from one household and a handful of toys from another might have seemed insignificant individually, but together they became a substantial collection. I began to appreciate common&good not simply as an organisation through which we carried out projects, but as a network that could connect resources already scattered throughout our community.
Unlike some of my earlier donations, this project began with a specific request rather than my own assumptions about what others might need. It made me realise that community work was not always about creating something new or asking people to give more. Sometimes, it was about recognising what already existed, bringing people together, and allowing things that had lost their purpose in one home to find another elsewhere. The value lay not only in what we collected, but in the connections that made the collection possible.
May 5th
A***** House Donation for Children's Day
Growing up in Korea, Children's Day had always been a date I looked forward to. It was a day when being a child felt like reason enough to celebrate, whether through a family outing, a favourite meal, or a small present. As May 5th approached, I began thinking about how differently the same occasion might be experienced, and decided to prepare gifts for the children at A******* House.
While choosing what to send, I found myself remembering how much my own preferences had changed as I grew older. A gift I would have loved at seven might have meant very little to me at thirteen. It reminded me that the children receiving these gifts were individuals with their own interests and personalities, not simply a group defined by where they lived. I tried to approach the donation with that in mind, rather than assuming that anything I chose would necessarily be appreciated.
I had initially thought of Children's Day as an occasion for adults to make children happy. But preparing these gifts made me reconsider that understanding. Perhaps celebrating children should involve more than deciding what might bring them joy. It should also mean recognising their individuality, respecting their preferences, and giving them room to decide what happiness looks like for themselves. I began to think that the most meaningful part of the day was not the presents, but the simple recognition that every child deserves to feel seen as a person in their own right.
March 16th
Braille Children's Books and Book Donation for Visually Impaired Children
As part of common&good, we worked on making children's storybooks accessible to visually impaired readers through Braille, while also collecting and donating additional books from our community. What began as a project centred on books gradually led us to question something more fundamental: what does it actually mean for knowledge to be accessible?
We began thinking about the distinction between formal equality and substantive equality. Two children may technically have access to the same library, yet if its books are available only in print, that equality exists more in principle than in practice. Accessibility, we realised, was not simply about providing identical resources, but about recognising that different individuals may require different means to enjoy the same opportunities. A story does not lose its meaning when its medium changes, but it may remain entirely inaccessible when that medium does not.
The experience also challenged our assumptions about inclusion. We had often understood it as bringing more people into existing spaces, but perhaps genuine inclusion required reconsidering how those spaces were designed in the first place. Books had always represented imagination, independence, and discovery to us. Through this project, we began to understand that the freedom to read should not depend on one's ability to see the printed page. Equality was not about ensuring everyone received the same book, but ensuring everyone had the opportunity to enter its world.
Weekly Zoom Online Lessons
In 2024, our online tutoring programme was still small, with just two common&good members teaching English fluency to seven children. There were no elaborate lesson plans or established teaching methods. Much of our time went into finding suitable reading passages, preparing conversation prompts, and thinking of ways to keep children speaking English when their instinct was to retreat into a more familiar language. A one-hour lesson could take several hours to prepare, particularly when we had to accommodate different levels of fluency. Balancing these commitments with schoolwork was often exhausting, and there were evenings when I wondered whether the time spent preparing a single lesson could have been used more effectively elsewhere.
Yet the most meaningful changes were often the least measurable. A child who initially responded with one-word answers might eventually tell an entire story, pausing to search for vocabulary but refusing to abandon the sentence. Sometimes, a conversation planned around a simple topic would wander into something entirely unexpected, and I would find myself listening far more than speaking. I began to realise that fluency was not simply about knowing more words. It was about becoming comfortable enough with uncertainty to use the words one already knew.
What made the experience particularly rewarding was also what made it so demanding. Progress could not be rushed, and there was rarely a single moment when I could confidently say that a lesson had succeeded. Unlike a completed assignment or a competition result, the value of our work accumulated quietly, through conversations that seemed unremarkable at the time. I had been accustomed to measuring effort by what I could finish. Teaching seven children made me confront the possibility that some of the most worthwhile things I could do would never feel finished at all.
Monthly Donations
Letter from sponsor child