Suwon City Holds Outreach Communication Meeting with Multicultural Organizations
[Suwon Ilbo=Reporter Seo Dong-young] On the 29th, Suwon City held an 'Outreach Communication Meeting with Multicultural Organizations' in the video conference room of City Hall, where it shared major city policies and key projects of multicultural-related organizations.
The meeting was attended by officials from the city's Multicultural Policy Division and representatives from various multicultural-related organizations including the Suwon Foreign Residents Welfare Center, Suwon Multicultural Family Support Center, Suwon Global Youth Dream Center, Danuri Call Gyeonggi Suwon Center, Suwon Migrant Center, and Suwon YWCA.
The city published a handbook for foreign residents titled "Korean Life, You Must Know This" in four languages (Korean, English, Chinese, and Vietnamese) and distributed it to migrants in July. For migrant youth, the city launched the 'Rainbow Job' project, which provides career and academic guidance services and vocational experience opportunities.
Additionally, the city operates employment education programs for married immigrant women, including barista certification courses, organization and storage certification courses, and driver's license acquisition certification courses.
The city operated a 20-member support team that accompanies newly arrived migrants to government offices and hospitals and provides interpretation and translation services. The city also launched various support projects including free medical services (internal medicine, surgery, dentistry, etc.) and beauty services.
The city promoted the 'Multicultural Harmony Community' recruitment project, which provides project funding to corporations and organizations that proposed programs for strengthening the capacity of foreign residents and supporting the self-reliance foundation of married immigrant women. Currently, 10 organizations are participating.
From June to July, the city provided emergency basic income of 200,000 won (100,000 won each from Suwon City and Gyeonggi Province) to 10,232 foreign residents.
Multicultural-related organizations that were closed due to COVID-19 continued to support migrants through non-face-to-face education programs.
The Suwon Foreign Residents Welfare Center provided non-face-to-face counseling via phone and the internet to help migrants resolve difficulties, and offered online language education to children of multicultural families.
The center also conducted online Korean language education for foreign workers and women, foreign language education for spouses of multicultural families, social integration programs, reading mentoring for children of multicultural families, Korean language proficiency test (TOPIK) preparation courses, and COVID-19 blues recovery programs including Zumba dance.
The Suwon Multicultural Family Support Center and Global Youth Dream Center also operated online educational programs to support migrants.
As of November 2018, the number of foreign residents in Suwon was 63,931, with foreign workers being the largest group at 14,823. This is followed by foreign nationals of Korean descent at 14,474, naturalized Korean citizens at 5,832, and married immigrants at 4,508.
Kim Mi-suk, head of the Multicultural Policy Division, said, "We will pursue various support projects in earnest so that multicultural families and foreign residents can actively engage in social activities and settle stably," and "We will actively support migrants so they can live together as members of our social community."