Princeton University students are truly amazing, but every so often, you meet one whose intellectualism, compassion, and service to their community reaches a new stratosphere. Today, it is my great pleasure to introduce Eojin Park, class of 2028. As you will soon read, Eojin has a number of incredible initiatives, projects, and awards. But what stands out to me the most, admirably so, is her love of community and the incredible connections she forms with her young readers.
Hi Eojin! Please tell us a little bit about yourself!
I’m a rising junior at Princeton University from Seoul, South Korea, studying International Relations with minors in Spanish, Portuguese, and Creative Writing. Language has always been at the center of everything I do, not just as a communication tool, but as a way of understanding how people make meaning as well as build identity. That curiosity about the intersection of literature, politics, and human experience shapes most of my work.
On the policy side, I was the youngest winner of the NATO Youth Summit Challenge and currently serve as a 2026 Max Thabiso Edkins Ambassador appointed by the World Bank. This summer, I’m working with UNESCO’s South Asia Bureau supporting regional media and information literacy initiatives. But beyond formal policy spaces, I’m also the founder of CRISIS!, a strategy-based educational platform where students simulate geopolitical decision-making and explore how narrative and language shape international conflict. A lot of that work has focused specifically on expanding access to political education for multilingual and immigrant communities — because I believe that who gets to participate in these conversations matters as much as what’s being said in them.
Please tell us about your literacy work in South Korea!
Growing up in Seoul, I was shaped by a community that invested deeply in my education, and I felt early on a responsibility to give something back. That impulse became Letters For Us, an English learning program I founded in partnership with the regional education ministry. What started as tutoring sessions grew into something more lasting — we eventually established a small library with over 300 books, and the program was later recognized by the Prudential Spirit of Community Awards. But the recognition that meant most to me was simpler: watching students articulate their ambitions out loud, often for the first time, in a language that had previously felt closed off to them.
That same commitment carried into my work with VoiceUs, a club I co-founded in association with South Korea’s Ministry of Unification to support North Korean refugee communities. Over three years, we raised over $10,000 — much of which went toward scholarship funds and literacy resources for second-generation refugee children. I also had the privilege of presenting our research and teaching experiences directly to the Ministry of Unification, which grounded our advocacy in something tangible. We even collaborated on a cookbook of North Korean recipes — because food, like language, carries memory and identity in ways that policy documents rarely can.
Alongside this, I taught English at local kindergartens and, during COVID-19, directed orchestra performances broadcast to a Sakhalin nursing home, where elderly Korean diaspora residents were largely isolated. Across all of it, the thread has been consistent: using whatever skills I have — language, music, storytelling — in service of communities that gave me so much.
What has been the most unexpected part of this initiative?
Honestly, the children themselves. I went in thinking my role was to give something — structure, vocabulary, access. What I didn’t anticipate was how much I would receive in return. The creativity and originality that these kids brought to every session consistently surprised me. They weren’t passive recipients of a curriculum; they were reinterpreting everything we gave them through their own experiences, languages, and imaginations. It reminded me that literacy isn’t about filling an empty vessel — it’s about giving people the tools to articulate what’s already inside them. That realization has shaped how I think about education ever since.
Would you be willing to share a story or experience with this project that you found touching, and tell us why?
There was a child in one of my sessions who was very quiet and also struggled significantly with reading aloud. For weeks, she would follow along silently while others participated. Then one day, unprompted, she read an entire passage on her own. Afterward she looked up and said, matter-of-factly, “I practiced at home.”
That moment stayed with me because I was confronted with the gap between her determination and the opportunities she had access to. She had done something genuinely hard, largely alone, with very few of the resources I had taken for granted growing up. Her effort humbled me. It also clarified something about why this work matters: not because we can solve systemic inequality one reading session at a time, but because every child who feels seen and capable in a learning environment is being told that the world has room for them. That message, repeated enough, changes things.
We’ve talked about your work with children and literacy, but would you also be willing to name a book from your own childhood that was formative?
There are too many to count honestly, but if I had to choose: The Giver by Lois Lowry. I read it young enough that I didn’t yet have the vocabulary for what it was doing, but I felt it — the horror of a world where memory, color, and difference had been erased in the name of safety and order. It was my first encounter with the idea that language and story are not decorative, but essential — that when you strip them away, you strip away something irreplaceable about what it means to be human. That felt urgent to me then, and it still does.
Once upon a time a very wise woman, and her equally wise son, had a vision. They wanted to uplift, inspire, and make a difference in the lives of people of color. After careful research and consideration, the son decided that early literacy would be the best way to transform the futures of children of color for the better, helping them reach their truest potential and rejoice in a love of learning and the power of their intellects.
The program became so successful in the United States that it expanded and is now available in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Republic of Ireland. Thanks to funding from Dolly and her community partners, over two million books are shipped each and every month to kids around the world!
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