Buyeo County in South Chungcheong Province is publicly recruiting members for the 5th Youth Policy Network. Applications are accepted until Friday, January 30, with no submissions on weekends. Young people aged 18 to 39 as of the announcement date are eligible. Results will be communicated individually in early February.
Applicants need to meet only one of four eligibility conditions. They may have their resident registration in Buyeo County, be enrolled in or on leave from a school in the county or attending graduate school there, work at a workplace in the county or own a business there, or be active in a youth organization in the county. That means the door is open to young people who work or study in Buyeo even if they do not live there.
Selected members serve for two years from the date of appointment and may be reappointed once. Their work is to gather opinions on youth policy, take part in county administration, and identify new policies. They attend general meetings and subcommittee meetings, and also take on voluntary activities and the submission of policy opinions. The selection criteria are understood to be whether the eligibility requirements are met and the willingness to take part in network activities.
There is a separate reason this recruitment stands out. Youth policies increase every year, yet there has long been criticism that the sense of benefit among the people who are supposed to use them has not kept pace. The diagnosis is that the problem lies in the channels through which policies reach young people rather than in the number of policies.
The situation in Incheon shows the structure clearly. Incheon has expanded youth policy centered on jobs, housing, startups, and welfare. In the jobs area, there are the Youth Challenge Support Project, the youth interview support program "Dream Narae," and support for operating local university Job Plus Centers. In the housing area, there is interest support for youth housing lease deposits, the Youth Welcome Pay that helps with moving costs, and the "1,000-won brokerage fee" program that caps brokerage commissions at 1,000 won.
The list alone looks comprehensive. But these programs are not tied together under a single system. Jobs are run by the economy and employment department, housing by the housing department, startups by the industry and economy department, and welfare by the welfare department, each as its own program. When departments differ, no linkage between policies takes place.
The expansion process has also leaned to one side. As the practice of adding new programs on top rather than adjusting or consolidating existing ones was repeated, programs that are similar or overlap in content have piled up. There is no integrated system to check which policies a single young person is receiving and how much. Evaluation has been carried out mainly around execution results and participant numbers for each program.
An Incheon city official said the city is aware of the criticism that the sense of benefit is low compared with the increase in the number of policies and the budget. Song Da-young, a professor of social welfare at Incheon National University, pointed to several reasons together: a shortage in the overall volume of policy itself, a system built around selective support, the exclusion of non-university students and young people in early employment because the design centers on university students, and the difficulty of overall coordination due to dispersion across departments.
When the people who will actually use a policy are left out of the process of making it, the distance between the design and reality does not narrow. The Buyeo County Youth Policy Network is one attempt to reduce that distance. This is the fifth cohort, and the 4th cohort members were appointed and served. No indicators have been released showing the number of members in each cohort or how much of the proposed policy was actually reflected in county administration.
Applications can be submitted by email or in person at the Population and Youth Team of the Strategic Projects Division at Buyeo County Office (33 Sabi-ro, Buyeo-eup). The documents required are an application form, a consent form for the collection, use, and provision of personal information, an abstract of resident registration with the latter digits of the resident registration number omitted, and, depending on eligibility, a certificate of employment or enrollment, a copy of a business registration certificate, or a certificate of activity. Inquiries can be made to the Population and Youth Team (041-830-2482).
There is no way at present to confirm whether Buyeo's experiment has actually solved the problem of the delivery framework. But it is clear that member positions with a two-year term are open, and that applications to take part are being accepted until January 30. A way for young people to put their names in the design column beyond the column of policy recipients, that is as far as things are changing now.
