Yangsan-si Accelerates 'Barrier-Free Yangsan Creation' Project Implementation

Disabled and Safe City Team and Youth Team Selected for Gyeongnam Community Chest of Korea Planned Project

Yangsan City in Gyeongnam has been promoting the ‘Creating a Barrier-Free Yangsan’ project since 2023 to bring together public and private organizations within the local community, identify the barriers faced by socially vulnerable groups in daily life, and develop policies accordingly.

Selected for the Barrier-Free Yangsan Project. Provided by Yangsan City

In particular, this year, the proposal from the Disabled and Safe City Team participating in the project was selected as a planned project for 2025 by the Gyeongnam Community Chest of Korea, and on the 15th, they received a distribution fund (a total of 300 million KRW over three years) at the Gyeongnam Community Chest’s main conference room.

The ‘Creating a Barrier-Free Yangsan’ project, which runs over four years starting in 2023, began in its first year by forming core personnel following a proposal from the Citizen Integration Committee. In 2024, it conducted innovative education on social problem-solving and citizen-centered innovative policy discovery workshops for the core personnel, providing a time for capacity building.

This year, through establishing project implementation strategies and operational plans, tailored projects to remove barriers will be promoted in the fields of the Disabled and Safe City Team, Elderly Team, Youth Team, and Women, Children & Youth Team, along with the operation of a citizen exploration group. Based on this, sector-specific implementation policies will be proposed to Yangsan City in 2026.

The planned projects of the Gyeongnam Community Chest of Korea are pilot and specialized projects selected and distributed through a rigorous screening process, reflecting local community welfare issues by either setting themes by the Chest or receiving proposals from distribution candidates.

The Disabled and Safe City Team’s executing agency for the ‘Creating a Barrier-Free Yangsan’ project, Yangsan City Disabled Welfare Center (Director Kim Jeong-ja), proposed the escape room project ‘PoFree [For(Four) Free]’ to eliminate care barriers faced by adults with severe disabilities in the community and was selected.

This project is a collaborative effort among citizens and various heterogeneous institutions to free adults with severe disabilities from four types of barriers?mobility, gaze, communication, and information?allowing them to enjoy an ordinary life. It aligns perfectly with the background and purpose of the ‘Creating a Barrier-Free Yangsan’ initiative, raising high expectations for its outcomes.

The Youth Team’s executing agency, Wongsang Comprehensive Social Welfare Center, also had its project designed to help socially isolated youth overcome barriers and enter society selected for the 2024 Gyeongnam Community Chest of Korea planned public offering project, receiving the second-year project funds this year. Other teams are also accelerating preparations to promote projects suited to their respective fields at their own pace.

A Yangsan City official expressed expectations, saying, “While achieving quantifiable results from the Creating a Barrier-Free Yangsan project is important, the collaboration among heterogeneous institutions carried out with the direction that all citizens should enjoy the happiness of everyday life as a given will become an experience of solidarity and spread positive influence throughout every corner of our region.”