SEOUL — Song Geon-eup was eighteen years old when he left the only home he had known for two decades. It was his high school graduation day, and the institutional care facility where he had grown up required him to vacate immediately. He remembers feeling excited about freedom, about finally controlling his own schedule. The reality proved less romantic.
"I had no idea how to plan a single day," Song recalls, now twenty-six and eight years into what Korea calls jaripjunbi cheongnyeon—youth preparing for independence, a bureaucratic term for young adults who age out of the child welfare system. "In the facility, everything was structured. Meal times, study hours, bedtime. When I woke up in my own room for the first time, I just sat there wondering what I was supposed to do next."
The disorientation went beyond daily routines. Song missed a crucial administrative deadline for resident registration, rendering him temporarily invisible to government systems. He fell victim to a financial scam that, in retrospect, seemed obviously fraudulent. He lived for months without curtains because he did not know how to install them and felt too embarrassed to ask.
"We're fragile," Song says, choosing his words carefully. "Like glass. One wrong move and everything shatters."
The Invisible Transition
South Korea's child welfare system serves approximately 23,000 children in institutional care at any given time. Each year, roughly 2,500 young people reach the age threshold—typically eighteen—and must leave. The government provides a modest independence stipend, usually around 5 million won (approximately $3,800), and access to subsidized housing programs. What it does not provide is the accumulated knowledge that most young adults absorb gradually from family members: how to negotiate a lease, recognize predatory lending, plan for irregular expenses, or simply ask for help.
Park Gang-bin, who spent twenty years in care facilities before aging out in 2017, conducted informal interviews with more than fifty fellow care leavers while working on a documentary project. When he asked about career aspirations, thirty of them mentioned becoming social workers. The pattern struck him as significant.
"At first I thought, that's wonderful—they want to give back," Park says. "But then I wondered: Did any of them have enough time to figure out what they actually enjoy? What they're good at? Or did they just choose the most familiar path?"
The question reveals a deeper tension. Care leavers face immediate pressure to generate income for rent, food, and utilities. Long-term career planning becomes a luxury when next month's bills loom. Many cycle through precarious service jobs—convenience stores, delivery services, call centers—that provide quick cash but limited advancement. The statistics bear this out: care leavers experience unemployment rates nearly double the national youth average and earn significantly less than peers with family support.
"Other young people have an umbrella," Park explains, using a metaphor that resonates among care leavers. "Parents, relatives, someone to shield them when things go wrong. We're standing in the rain alone, getting soaked."
Filling the Gaps
The challenge has not gone unnoticed. Over the past five years, a patchwork of initiatives has emerged to address what policy experts call the "transition gap"—the period between institutional care and stable independence when young adults are most vulnerable.
Some efforts come from government agencies expanding mentorship programs. Others originate with nonprofits like the Social Solidarity Bank, which pairs care leavers with financial counselors. Increasingly, however, corporate Korea has entered the space, driven partly by ESG (environmental, social, governance) mandates and partly by recognition that youth independence represents a systemic failure with long-term economic consequences.
Hanwha Life Insurance, one of the country's largest financial services companies, launched its WE CARE initiative in 2022 specifically targeting care leavers. The program provides three-year savings matches that can accumulate up to 10 million won—enough for a security deposit on a modest apartment or seed money for education. More unusually, it funds a youth-led membership organization where care leavers manage their own mutual aid fund.
"We wanted to move beyond charity," explains a program coordinator who requested anonymity to keep focus on participants rather than corporate branding. "The question was: How do we create infrastructure that respects their agency?"
The membership model allows care leavers to pool resources for life events that typically require family support—weddings, medical emergencies, job loss. Members vote on fund allocation and elect operating committees. When one member got married last year, dozens of peers attended the ceremony, many meeting in person for the first time.
"It felt like having a family," says Song, who joined the membership program in its first cohort. "Not in a sentimental way. I mean practically—people who show up when it matters."
Beyond Financial Capital
The corporate involvement extends to physical infrastructure. In April, Hanwha partnered with the Salvation Army to open a dedicated transition facility in Seoul—a remodeled 100-square-meter space where care leavers can access computers, meet with counselors, and attend workshops on everything from tax filing to job interviews. The company plans to replicate the model in other cities.
Hanwha General Insurance sponsors an annual charity marathon that raises funds for care leaver programs while increasing public visibility. Hanwha Impact, the group's social investment arm, runs a mentoring initiative pairing recently independent youth with those who aged out five or ten years earlier and have achieved relative stability.
The mentoring program reveals an important insight: care leavers often make the most effective support providers for one another. They share vocabulary, understand unspoken anxieties, and model realistic rather than aspirational success. A mentor who struggled for years before finding stable employment offers more credible guidance than a well-meaning professional who never faced housing insecurity.
"The seniors know which mistakes are normal," Park explains. He now serves as a mentor himself. "They don't judge you for not knowing things that seem obvious to everyone else."
Redefining Success
Critics argue that corporate ESG programs, however well-intentioned, cannot substitute for comprehensive welfare reform. They point out that South Korea's per-capita spending on child welfare remains below OECD averages and that aging-out policies have not substantially changed in two decades despite growing evidence of inadequacy.
"Private initiatives are helpful but insufficient," says Professor Kim Min-jung, a social welfare researcher at Seoul National University who studies care leaver outcomes. "We're asking corporations to patch holes in the social safety net that government should be maintaining. That's backwards."
The critique has merit. Yet the care leavers themselves tend to focus less on institutional responsibility and more on immediate survival. They speak pragmatically about cobbling together support from multiple sources—government stipends, nonprofit services, corporate programs, peer networks. The question is not who should help but whether enough help exists.
Song has advice for younger care leavers, though he admits it is advice he still struggles to follow: "Don't spend all your time worrying about the distant future. Focus on today. Do one thing well. Find one small happiness. That's enough."
Park frames it differently, drawing on his documentary interviews: "Care leavers have infinite potential. They're holding gems that might need polishing. Some will succeed, some will fail. But they're not broken. They're just starting from a different place."
What It Means
South Korea's care leaver population remains relatively small compared to countries with larger foster systems. But the challenges they face illuminate broader questions about social mobility, family structure, and collective responsibility in rapidly changing societies.
As traditional extended family networks weaken and single-person households proliferate, more young Koreans—not just care leavers—find themselves navigating adulthood without inherited safety nets. The skills that care leavers develop by necessity—resourcefulness, self-reliance, community-building—may become increasingly relevant.
The corporate sector's growing involvement in social welfare, meanwhile, reflects both opportunity and risk. Companies bring resources, organizational capacity, and innovation to problems that government bureaucracies struggle to address. They also bring profit motives, public relations objectives, and the potential to treat structural inequities as branding opportunities.
The test will be whether these initiatives create lasting infrastructure or merely generate feel-good stories. For now, care leavers like Song and Park remain cautiously optimistic. They have learned not to expect perfection—only enough support to keep standing when the rain comes.
"If all our youth break and disappear," Park says, echoing a phrase common among care leavers, "there's no future for our society. We're not asking for special treatment. Just a fair chance to build something."
This article examines social support systems for care leavers in South Korea. Corporate programs mentioned represent examples of private-sector engagement with youth welfare challenges.
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