for the common and for the good
for the common & good
Mission Statement
common&good began with a different name and a simple question: how much of a person’s future should be decided by where they happen to start?
Our initial name was Mirae&, from the Korean word mirae, meaning “future.” The ampersand was deliberately left open: future and opportunity, future and education, future and whatever else might allow change to last beyond a single project. From the beginning, the idea was not just to help in the present, but to think about what changes will remain in the long term.
That meant thinking about inequality not only in terms of what people have today, but what they are able to access tomorrow. Inequality is not only about income. It is also about access to education, opportunities, information, communities, and sometimes simply the knowledge that certain possibilities exist. Small differences at the beginning can compound into much larger ones over time.
That is where common&good hopes to work: at those points where a difference in access can become a difference in outcome. Through our projects, we want to make useful resources and opportunities accessible to more people, while also asking why that access was unequal in the first place. Helping matters, but so does understanding what made that help necessary.
We do not expect to solve global inequality, nor do we think any single project can. But making something a little bit more equal, slightly more accessible, or simply more common is a worthwhile place to begin.
For the common. For the good. For the common&good.
Partnering Organisations
Deokpo Sewing Machine Trading Co.
Zeze books
SPD Corporation
Jay's Adventure
Hyundai Blg.
Westminster Politics Society
People
Future goals
common&good is still at its beginning. As I grow, I want the project to grow in both scale and substance with me.
In the near term, I plan to continue linking my running to giving. For every official race I complete, I pledge a fixed amount per kilometre to a cause connected to inequality. As I enter more 10Ks, half-marathons, and eventually marathons, I want the distance I run to translate directly into something beyond a finishing time or medal. The longer I run, quite literally, the more I give.
At the moment, there is an obvious limit to what I can contribute financially as a student. Becoming an adult will bring greater financial independence, but also greater responsibility over where that money goes. I want to commit a proportion of my future earnings to common&good, allowing it to fund larger projects rather than relying only on small donations. Greater resources should also mean greater credibility: the ability to approach schools, charities, businesses, researchers, and other organisations not simply with an idea, but with the means to help carry it out.
But I do not want common&good to become a project that only writes cheques. The longer-term objective is to tackle inequalities one by one, through projects designed around the particular problem rather than a single formula for “helping.” If the problem is unequal access to education, that might mean providing books, tutoring, or academic resources. If it is unequal access to markets, it might mean working directly with producers and creating routes for their products to reach new buyers. If it is a lack of awareness, it might mean research, writing, campaigns, or public events. Different inequalities have different causes, so they should not all receive the same solution.
Eventually, I want common&good to become increasingly collaborative. That means finding people who understand a problem better than I do, whether students, local communities, academics, businesses, or existing organisations, and building projects with them rather than assuming I already know the answer. Some projects may be tiny. Others may grow. Some may fail entirely and need to be redesigned.
One by one.
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