On September 25th, trainers from AktivAsia Korea shared their learnings adopting organizing into their local contexts with over 30 people from around the world, especially from Asia Pacific and Africa regions. The session was held in both English and Korean, with simultaneous translation. From conducting a listening exercise to understand the needs of their community, translating participant and facilitator guide and conducting a workshop for their prioritized leadership frameworks, and following up with the participants’ learning afterward, Jihun Jang and Yeti Khim’s journey has inspired other organizers and trainers to bring organizing back to their communities.

Understanding the needs of the community

In a listening exercise, Jihun interviewed 26 stakeholders from 24 organizations and identified two key challenges:

• Struggles with public engagement and organizing, worsened by COVID-19.
• Civil society’s language is too technical, making it hard to engage the public.

As a result, Jihun decided to focus on teaching public narrative, or in Korean, “shared narrative,” using compelling stories based on shared values to build empathy and connection, and then help organizations use those narratives to improve their public engagement.

Translating the participant and facilitator guide into Korean

Yeti and Jihun spent around 60~80 hours over the 3~4 month process in translating the participant and facilitator guide for an organizing workshop that covers coaching, public narrative, and relationship building:

• Kick-off: Align on goal, scope, and timeline; Share resources
• Translate glossary: ~30 key terms from the organizing framework; consulted (5-6 hours)
• Initial AI translation: Used AI translation tool to do first pass at translating the participants guide ~80 pages (~1 hour)
• Finalize & localize guide: Included review meetings to discuss open questions (30~40 hours)
• Translate graphics: ~15 graphics (sometime had to recreate from scratch) (5 hrs)
• Finalize and upload guide: Localized descriptions and uploaded final translated guide to LCN  resource center (2 hours)

Prepare for workshop: Adjust guide for workshop including changes to agenda, timetable (5~10 hours)

Tips on translation

• On the team, include linguistic experts and content experts (someone who is familiar with the organizing framework – a previous student, facilitator, coach, etc.)
• Experiment with tools like AI translators to give yourself a head start (1hr gets you 70% there).
• But not all AI tools are created equally, so choose the right one!
• Stay organized. Document decisions, work progress and final documents in a single place.
• Anchor and work backwards from a clear field use-case (in our case, AktivAsia had already set a goal of hosting a workshop in the summer)

Hosting the workshop in Seoul

Yeti and Jihun designed the workshop in a small group format to ensure deep reflection on personal and shared values, as well as thorough feedback through extensive practice and small group coaching. They also invited a climate activist who shared her experience of applying public narrative to their work, which inspired participants to develop and apply their own narratives to their real-world work.

Voices from the workshop participants

Borim Kim from Youth4ClimateAction who participated in the workshop shared her journey learning and using public narrative in her work. She joined the workshop, keen on gaining a framework for delivering effective change-making messages, which she was already doing based on her guts.

“Public narrative is about becoming stronger to make change and deliver the most effective message and exercise our power to our target. That is what I learned from the workshop. In order to create change we need to have power, we need to become an organization that has power internally, and we need to increase the advocates [from the general public] who support us and our messages.”
– Borim Kim, Youth4ClimateAction

After the workshop, Borim held a session within her organization to share each member’s personal story of self and illustrate the vision of the organization. This helped them imagine how each of them will grow their leadership through their work at the organization, strengthening their motivations in their work.

Borim provided an example in which public narrative transformed an environmental legal action to a movement anyone can join. Borim’s organization created channels for people to participate and collected voices from 5,000 people, which emphasized the social consensus making regarding climate change policies in Korea. Through a story of us, the constitutional appeal became a public issue, which gave more power to the general public.

Hyesung An from Solutions For Our Climate shared a powerful public narrative about her experience approaching the steel industry that contributes largely to carbon emissions. She provided a powerful imagery of what could happen if things continued to be how they are and provided an action that everyone can take to choose a better future.

From the audience

The Zoom chat was constantly active with flowing thoughts on adaptation and questions for the speakers. People who have contextualized organizing in their communities shared similarities with the struggles of the contextualization in Korea, such as translating particular words that have added nuances in their languages.

The audience also shared their thoughts in breakout room sessions. One of the breakout groups discussed whether it’s more effective to start a narrative from a deeply personal experience or to share something more universally relatable; this group concluded that starting from the most personal experiences is usually the most effective, as it enables the speaker to touch other people’s minds more.

Watch the recording

Recordings of the session in English and in Korean are available for LCN members here.

If you are interested in becoming a member to watch the recording and access 300+ other resources on organizing – guides in various languages and case studies from around the world – please let us know at resources@leadingchangenetwork.org!

About the speakers

Jihun Jang

Jihun Jang is an environmental educator and the Program Manager for AktivAsia in Korea, dedicated to fostering social change through campaigns for renewable energy expansion and climate justice. She designs and develops training programs tailored to Korea’s context, covering campaign strategy, community organization, public narrative, and leadership. Jihun provides essential coaching and training to activists, enhancing their potential and impact. She also connects individuals and strategies to strengthen community efforts, focusing on motivation, thought processes, and relationship building. Jihun also serves as a board member at BigWave, a youth climate network, and actively participates in the National Environmental Education Youth Committee, contributing to environmental movements and educational initiatives. Outside of work, Jihun is a foodie, creative cook, and avid traveller, exploring cultures and cuisines worldwide.

Yeti Khim

Yeti Khim recently graduated with a joint master’s degree in policy and business degree from Harvard Kennedy School and MIT Sloan. Empowered by Ganz’s organizing frameworks she learned, she facilitated a public narrative workshop for climate leaders in South Korea. Prior to school, she spent 10 years working in consulting and tech startups across the US and Southeast Asia. In her last role, she served as the Chief Product Officer in the Ministry of Education in Indonesia. She seeks to continue empowering the next generation of students through a new education venture of her own in Southeast Asia. Yeti’s love language is books and one of her personal dreams is to write a book and open a bookstore together with her father.

For more resources and information

The session concluded with introductions to the translated guides and further learning opportunities. It was magical to share space with the amazing Korean organizers who had embarked on their journeys and also with trainers around the world who brought their experiences and ideas into the room.

If you are interested in translating the organizing guides into your language and/or hosting your own workshop in your community or country, please feel free to reach out to resources@leadingchangenetwork.org for support!