The Enabling Freedom Network was launched today at a meeting hosted by the All Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea Enabling Freedom Network focuses on developing the leadership skills of North Korean escapees to enable them to build strong support networks for North Koreans and develop solutions to problems faced by their communities and North Korean people wherever they have found refuge around the world.
The meeting was attended by co-chairs, Lord Alton of Liverpool and Fiona Bruce MP, along with their fellow Officer, Catherine West MP. Also in attendance were escapees from North Korea. Lord Alton paid tribute to the work of Michael Glendinning, the CEO of Connect: North Korea who has been a driving force in creating the Network/
The programme provides a stipend to support North Koreans into postgraduate education. In addition to the stipend, Enabling Freedom Network provides free mental health support and will run termly workshops with participants on driving
social change and leadership skills to help others in their community.
The aim of this programme is to remove barriers to tertiary education and enable the emergence of a cohort of North Koreans ready and able to drive social change in their local communities. A secondary aim of the programme is to help North
Koreans build their social capital and connect North Korean diasporas across the globe with the goal of helping change the narrative around escapees.
The meeting heard that around 35,000 North Korean escapees in various countries around the world, with the largest communities in South Korea, Japan, the UK, US, and Canada.
There is also a large community in China, but organisations are unable to safely access them to provide support. Over 70% of the escapees in safe countries are female, but recently the % arriving each year is skewing above 80%. In the UK
alone, there are around 300-400 registered North Koreans, the majority of whom
live in New Malden.
One of the partners in the Network is Connect: North Korea (CNK) – a UK-based organisation with a global aim – to
enable every person who escapes the oppression of life in North Korea to heal, grow, and live the life they choose. Established in the UK in 2018, our programmes enable North Koreans to overcome the many barriers that prevent them from
building new lives in their adopted countries.
Escaping is only the first of many hurdles North Koreans face in building new lives. Because of the lack of freedoms in North Korea, they face a long list of significant barriers including a lack of qualifications and skills; mental health problems
caused by trauma; and challenges adjusting to very different environments, social structures, and belief systems to their homeland.
The combination of these challenges is often too much for North Korean escapees to overcome on their own, so they often find themselves with limited options, trapped in poor employment with low wages, and unable to build the new lives
they’ve dreamed of. Without support tailored for their complex range of needs, North Koreans escape oppression only to find they still have their choices limited and cannot prosper or make the most of their newfound freedom.
Connect: North Korea currently runs three programmes with the goal of enabling every person who escapes the oppression of life in North Korea to heal, grow, and live the life they choose: Enabling Resilience; Enabling Freedom; and now the
Enabling Freedom Network.
Another partner is Enabling Resilience – a holistic psycho-social community support programme for North Korean escapees in the UK. Enabling Resilience combines community outreach, youth support, mental health care, and advice, information, and
guidance services to support North Korean escapees to build their resilience for overcoming the day-to-day barriers they have to building new lives.
Enabling Freedom supports North Koreans to gain the skills and qualifications they need to find better jobs, the knowledge and confidence to take advantage of the opportunities they now have, and to build the fulfilling lives everyone
deserves. vocational programme. The programme is a multi-year intervention, focused on providing English language courses, digital literacy training, modules on career planning and job hunting, as well as a scholarship to fund a vocational
qualification. This has been implemented since 2021.
