I’ve been involved with Think North Korea for well over a year. I got involved in October of 2013, with some planning sessions and meetings, and a couple of email chains. I was a freshman, with a little bit of public speaking experience. I just walked up to the then-seniors who were running TNK at the time, and basically said, “I want to help.”
In December of the same year, I actually started rehearsing a presentation alongside Pranav, that we gave at Lovett the following spring, which is when I wrote my first post on this site.
It’s been a full year since then, and I kind of can’t believe how much the group has grown and changed, and how much I have grown and changed with it.
For one thing, we’ve got a Facebook presence that is half again as big as it was last December.
We’ve grown as a leadership team, and as a nonprofit group in the first place.
Many of us have grown as individuals, as well. I wrote one guest post on this site last year, now I am running the blog myself.
We’ve raised our ideals in terms of fundraising, and we’ve been fulfilling those new goals.
Everyone in TNK this year got involved over the course of last year, at a point when we knew very little about the crisis, and needed to practice over and over to learn the points which we communicate about every day.
Now, I think I’ve explained those points so many times that I could actually rattle them off in my sleep. I can certainly explain them with emotion behind the words, and with the goal in mind of both educating the people with whom I’m talking, and convincing them to help.
And people do listen, and they do want to help.
The reason TNK exists as a group in the first place is because we want to educate people about the crisis, and we want to help support the rescue missions.
No matter where we go, there is someone who learns about the oppression caused by the regime, realizes that they want to get involved or at least donate money to our cause. The more we grow, the more people there are who know what’s going on and what they can do to help. These are the people who make up our main audience. They help us grow as a group and as a cause, and that is what makes us capable of making any difference at all.
We can only say thank you.
Thank you to those of you who have donated time, money, or even just attention to our cause. You have made a difference, one that is slowly becoming more and more tangible.
We’ve grown a lot in the past year—let’s make the next one even better.
Think North Korea 