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Busan Metropolitan City Establishes Prevention-Oriented Mental Well-being Support System for 300,000 Children and Adolescents, Signs MOUs with Education Office and UNICEF

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Busan Metropolitan City announced that it will sign an MOU today (January 22) at 2:20 p.m. at City Hall’s International Protocol Room with the Busan Metropolitan Office of Education and the Korean Committee for UNICEF to promote mental well-being among children and adolescents.

The signing ceremony will be attended by Mayor Park Heong-joon, Superintendent of Education Kim Seok-jun, Secretary General Cho Mi-jin of the Korean Committee for UNICEF, and other related officials.

The agreement was prepared in response to the recent worsening of mental health issues among children and adolescents, such as depression and anxiety, and aims to shift from an approach focused on post-crisis intervention to a prevention-oriented mental well-being support system.

In particular, the City plans to play a connecting and complementary role so that emotional support education provided by the Office of Education within schools can continue seamlessly into the local community outside schools, thereby gradually establishing an integrated mental well-being support system in which schools and communities work together.

Under the agreement, the three organizations will cooperate throughout the entire process with the goal of promoting the mental well-being of 300,000 children and adolescents in Busan, including setting the planning and implementation direction for mental well-being support projects, promoting prevention-oriented mental well-being programs for children and adolescents, establishing a support system linking schools, families, and communities, strengthening the capacities of teachers and practitioners, and ensuring policy feedback through the development and sharing of performance indicators.

Based on figures as of December 2025, the number of children and adolescents in Busan aged 7 to 18 stands at 305,832.

Busan Metropolitan City will be responsible for operating community-based programs for children and adolescents, providing education for children, adolescents, and related practitioners, and leading mental well-being campaigns and promotional activities to raise public awareness.

The Busan Metropolitan Office of Education will support the stable operation of social and emotional learning education in schools, strengthen teachers’ capacities in mental well-being education through training programs, and encourage parental guidance and participation through family-linked education. Social and emotional learning refers to education that systematically develops social and emotional competencies such as self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and relationship-building.

The Korean Committee for UNICEF will provide prevention-oriented mental well-being programs and educational materials, support capacity-building education for teachers and related practitioners, and take charge of developing and monitoring performance indicators to measure the outcomes of collaborative projects.

In addition, from today (January 22) through January 25, the mental well-being campaign exhibition “10.19 Hertz Deep Within the Mind – The Silent Objects Exhibition,” organized by the Korean Committee for UNICEF, will be held in the urban railway connecting passage on the first floor of City Hall.

The 10.19 Hertz frequency symbolizes the minds of adolescents aged 10 to 19 and conveys the message that their inner worlds should be carefully listened to by tuning into their frequency.

This exhibition is part of a mental well-being campaign led by the Korean Committee for UNICEF and is a participatory exhibition in which adolescents express the deep stories of their inner minds—often difficult to articulate in words—through the medium of lockers. The exhibition aims to provide an opportunity to look more closely into the minds of adolescents and to raise awareness that mental well-being is not an individual issue, but a task that society must address together.

Mayor Park Heong-joon said, “It is important for children to value both their bodies and minds and to cultivate consideration for others,” adding, “This agreement will serve as a turning point toward prevention-oriented mental well-being policies rather than reactive measures, and as a starting point to help today’s children and adolescents build a healthy future for society tomorrow.”