Every diaspora carries a distance. We help young Koreans close it.
The Jeong Project is building the first immersive heritage journey for Korean diaspora youth, reconnecting them with heritage, identity, and each other.
A community that calls itself Korean, and still hides parts of itself
Korean Americans hold onto their identity more tightly than most: about two-thirds describe themselves as "Korean" or "Korean American" first, a stronger identification than the broader Asian American average.1 But that pride sits alongside something harder to see: roughly one in four Korean Americans say they've hidden part of their heritage from people outside the community.2
Researchers who study second-generation and 1.5-generation Korean Americans describe a familiar pattern underneath those numbers: language lost within a single generation, family history that was never fully passed down, and the particular strain of feeling caught between two cultures with no structured way to close the gap.3
Korean adoptees show what happens when a structured path back exists. Decades of heritage-travel and "motherland tour" programs have given adoptees a documented, repeatable way to reconnect with identity and roots, real proof that this kind of journey works.4 It has just never been built at the scale the wider diaspora needs.
- Pew Research Center, "Korean Americans: A Survey Data Snapshot" (2024).
- Pew Research Center, "1 in 5 Asian Americans have hidden part of their heritage" (2023).
- See e.g. research on second-generation and 1.5-generation Korean American identity, such as "Between Two Worlds: Nationality and Identity in Korean Immigrants", PMC.
- See Holt International, "Fifty Years of Holt's Korea Heritage Tour"; and Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke University Press).
No equivalent exists. We're building it.
For nearly three decades, a similar model has sent young diaspora adults elsewhere in the world on immersive, fully-subsidized heritage trips, and the results have been remarkable. Research on the approach has found measurable, lasting increases in cultural identity, community involvement, and peer connection among participants, compared to those who didn't go.
No equivalent exists for the Korean diaspora. There is no structured, immersive, identity-first heritage journey built specifically for young Korean Americans and Koreans abroad: no program using that same "gift, not obligation" psychology that makes it so effective at reaching people who wouldn't otherwise seek this out on their own.
We're building it.
What ten days can build
- A stronger, more settled sense of cultural identity
- A lifelong peer community built through shared experience
- Real tools for navigating hybrid identity, not just awareness of it
- Reduced isolation around questions of belonging
- Renewed, active connection to family heritage, not just knowledge of it
This starts with people who believe it matters.
We're building something that doesn't exist yet, and we're building it early enough that the people who join now will help shape what it becomes.