2009 KAVC Summer Internship Graduation Ceremony

On September 4, 2009, The Korean American Voters’ Council (KAVC) celebrated the graduating members of the 2009 summer internship session at the Open Center, located in Korea Village in Flushing.

The KAVC Summer Internship Program is an annually run 6 week program which began on June 29th and ended on August 4th this year. This year there were four interns from New York, Jihyung Kim, Kijae Kim, Sosung Kim, and Yoonsun Na, and nine interns from New Jersey, Jae An, Paul “Kyucheol” Kim, Cristina Kwon, Joshua Lee, Jae Hyung Lee, Yoon Ji Nam, Dasol Park, Ashely Shim, and Michelle Whang.

Over the summer, the interns tackled various issues plaguing the local community and learned to empathize with the problem and find a grassroots solution to it. In addition to voter registration, two of the major issues which the interns worked on was the creation of a “Comfort Woman” Memorial and the revision of parking regulation on Northern Boulevard.

The internship program was designed in a way to help cultivate leadership qualities and immerse students in real world issues and help find the tools and skills they need to resolves these issues in themselves and their community. The key is for the people to come together, their resources, their voices, their manpower to create a positive change.

Even though the internship have ended, the students were ambitious to come back to KAVC and finish working on the projects they have worked on the summer and come as a volunteer continuously.