What is Jeong (정)?
정 (jeong) is a foundational idea in Korean life, a deep, often wordless bond of affection, loyalty, and belonging that runs through Korean relationships, families, and communities. It's the feeling of being truly known and truly connected.
For diaspora youth raised between cultures, that bond can feel just out of reach. Many grow up fluent in two worlds and fully at home in neither, carrying Korean heritage without ever having had the space to claim it on their own terms.
The Jeong Project exists to close that distance. We give young Korean Americans, and Koreans across the diaspora, an immersive path back to the connection that jeong describes: to their heritage, to their history, and to each other.
Our Purpose
Mission: To give Korean diaspora youth an immersive, structured path to cultural identity, confidence, and belonging.
Vision: A generation of Korean diaspora young adults who carry their heritage with pride, confidence, and lasting connection to community.
In practice, that means:
- Explore Korean identity on their own terms. Room to work out what being Korean means to them personally, not a fixed answer handed down, but a question they get real space to sit with.
- Strengthen connection to Korea and its people. Not as tourists passing through, but through direct contact with Korean history, contemporary society, and the people living in it now.
- Build a lasting peer community. The relationships formed over ten days are meant to outlast the trip: a network participants can return to for the rest of their lives.
- Contribute to a stronger, more connected diaspora. Every participant who returns home more confident in their identity becomes part of a wider community carrying Korean heritage forward.
Research on similar heritage-journey models has found measurable, lasting effects on identity, community involvement, and long-term engagement among participants, compared to those who didn't go. We're building toward that same kind of lasting effect, for the Korean diaspora.
The Gift of a Lifetime
Some experiences you have to earn: you apply, you qualify, you prove yourself worthy of them first. The Jeong Project isn't built that way.
This is a heritage journey offered as an act of belief: that Korean diaspora youth are worth investing in simply because their heritage is already theirs by right, not because they've demonstrated anything to deserve it. No test of how "Korean enough" you are. No requirement that you already speak the language, know the history, or have made the trip before. The invitation comes first.
Ten days of root-seeking, ritual, hard history, and harder conversations aren't handed to participants as a reward for anything. They're offered as a gift, freely given, without an expectation of anything owed in return, because that's the only way to reach the people who'd never have gone looking for this on their own.
What participants carry home afterward isn't a souvenir. It's a changed sense of who they are, and a cohort of people who went through it with them. Like the best gifts always are, it's personal. And like the best gifts, it's meant to outlast the day it was given.
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.