Suwon Saebbit Care Wins Grand Prize at National Manifesto Best Practices Contest

[Suwon Ilbo=Reporter Chung Jun-sung] The Suwon Saebbit Care project, recognized as one of the achievements of Suwon Special City's eighth term of democratic governance, won the Grand Prize at the '2024 National Municipal Heads Manifesto Best Practices Contest.'

The city announced on the 1st that it achieved this feat by submitting 'Suwon Saebbit Care' in the demographic change response category and winning the Grand Prize.

Suwon Saebbit Care is a care service available to any citizen in need, receiving praise for resolving care service gaps. The service provides four major categories with 11 types of care services in a lifestyle-focused manner, proactively strengthening support for rapidly growing elderly populations and single-person households.

In particular, the initiative garnered high evaluations for providing differentiated services such as temporary pet sheltering and developing resident-proposed services like meal delivery services, creating specialized services unique to Suwon.

Additionally, village-level projects aimed at eliminating care blind spots—such as cultural and leisure activities for elderly people with mobility difficulties, basic fitness exercises for health-vulnerable populations, and horticulture and emotional support services for elderly people living alone—also received favorable responses.

Suwon Saebbit Care responded to urgent care service gaps among Suwon residents by providing 10,979 care service cases, establishing universal care services for citizens.

The contest, hosted by the Korean Manifesto Practice Center and the Gyeongnam Research Institute, was held over July 30-31 at Inje University's Gimhae Campus.

Under the theme 'Rewriting Local Government, Resilience,' the contest solicited best practices in seven fields. A total of 353 cases were submitted from 148 municipal governments nationwide. After documentary screening, 186 cases advanced to the final competition through on-site presentations, selecting the most excellent and excellent municipalities by field.

Previously, the city won the Grand Prize in the inequality mitigation category at last year's contest with 'City for All, One Suwon,' a policy introducing immigrant participation in city governance. Since 2011, the city has won a total of 11 awards through this year.

Suwon Mayor Lee Jae-joon stated, "I am grateful that Suwon City's efforts in creating Saebbit Care to fill gaps in existing welfare services and resolve even minor inconveniences in citizens' daily lives have resulted in this award," and added, "Moving forward, we will continue to build Suwon as a care special city that warmly embraces anyone in need of care."