Connect: North Korea

Enabling Resilience

Our qualified Korean mental health professionals are uniquely placed to understand the trauma North Korean escapees experience, and the challenges they face in their attempts to integrate into new societies so different from anything they have ever known, with freedoms that are so alien to them.

This shared lived experience and language is crucial to supporting North Korean people with their recovery, and developing the skills and confidence they need to make informed choices about their lives and take their full place in society.

Enabling Resilience integrates community outreach, mental health care, and advice, information, and guidance services.

It is designed to provide the scaffolding to maximise successful completion of the Enabling Freedom programme, ensuring each person gets as much benefit as possible from the opportunities it provides.

Enabling Freedom

Our innovative programme is specifically designed to empower escaped North Korean people to overcome these barriers and transform their futures.

Enabling Freedom supports North Korean people living in the UK to gain the skills and qualifications, and develop the confidence, they need to access types of work that would otherwise be unavailable to them.

The Enabling Freedom programme provides escaped North Korean people with the holistic educational, well-being, and financial support, they need to gain recognised vocational and professional qualifications.

This allows them the opportunity to pursue their dreams, and choose the lives they want to live.

Enabling Freedom Network

We firmly believe that the best people to drive lasting positive change for North Korean escapees are North Korean people themselves.

Our Enabling Freedom Network is a world-first social leadership and scholarship scheme designed to enhance the education and leadership skills of North Korean escapee change-makers.

We aid ambitious North Korean escapees to reach their full potential so they can in turn enable their own community to do the same.

To achieve this, we work with a variety of professions; from lawyers to teachers to social entrepreneurs and medical professionals. We also engage with political, religious, and civil society leaders, as well as any other positions that can drive transformational change for North Korean escapees.

Our goal is for these change-makers to get university qualifications alongside participation in a specialised social leadership training programme.