About

I'm a Korean woman living in Seoul — on Indigenous land, in a lineage of spiritual workers and farmers, in a country whose pre-modern ways of life were fractured by Japanese colonization, proxy war, and ongoing American military presence.

I came to this work through the long way around. I studied liberation theology, earned a Master's in Public Health, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for community health programs.

I built a business that became a platform for decolonial teachers and redistributed well over a million dollars to mutual aid funds and humanitarian and ecological projects — from Hawaii to Gaza. I am currently working toward the revitalization of my ancestral lands in Gyeongsang Province, Korea.

Through my life's work, a question kept coming into sharp focus: why does so much money raised for liberation move through structures that reproduce the logic of extraction?

Why do the people closest to the harm have the least say over the resources?

And why does philanthropy treat Indigenous leadership as a feature — a nice addition — rather than the condition of its own legitimacy?

Indigenous Led Philanthropy is my attempt to build a coherent and effective answer.

Concretely, that means three things: (1) educating the public about what Indigenous-led philanthropy is and why it matters; (2) connecting donors and funders directly with Indigenous-led organizations and funds around the world; and (3) strengthening the networks that allow Indigenous communities to find each other, share knowledge, and move resources laterally — without a central authority controlling the flow.

I have skin in this. My own ancestral land lost many of its ways of knowing before I was born — fractured by forces that philanthropy, in its current form, has done nothing to repair. Building this movement is, for me, also an act of recovering what we lost. What was lost contains wisdom the world urgently needs — about how wealth should move, who should govern it, and what it is actually for.

This movement is at its beginning. I am building it in public, in collaboration with Indigenous elders, teachers, movement leaders, and organizations around the world.