Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, Hanyang University’s social innovation festival, the Seventeen Hearts Festival was held under the new slogan “From Changemaker to Futuremaker.” This year’s festival marked an important turning point, reflecting on the past decade’s journey and presenting a vision toward the next ten years. The event took place from September 15 to 19 on both the Seoul and ERICA campuses and featured social innovation booths, talk concerts, and forums organized by a student planning team.

Since 2015, the Seventeen Hearts Festival has supported youth engaging in solving social problems. Yoo Hye-in, deputy manager of the Global Social Innovation Team and overall coordinator of this year’s festival, explained, “The Seventeen Hearts Festival has emphasized the role of ‘Changemakers’—young people who identify social challenges and conceive solutions that bring sustainable change.”

This year's theme goes a step further. Yoo Hye-in said, “The theme ‘Futuremaker’ reflects the meaning of being agents who not only solve current problems based on transformative experiences but also actively imagine and lead future creation.” He added, “It signifies young people as experimenters and leaders of social innovation shaping a sustainable future. I hope the festival becomes a platform for supporting challenges and imaginations of the youth.”

This year's Seventeen Hearts Festival served as a meaningful occasion to summarize past achievements and look ahead. Yoo highlighted, “the Seventeen Hearts Festival intersects directly with how social innovation has taken root and grown at Hanyang University, and the opportunities for students’ growth within.”

Hanyang University offers a formal curriculum, ‘Social Innovation’ major, alongside diverse extracurricular programs fostering students’ social innovation capabilities. Yoo further explained, “Sharing outcomes and cases created annually via Seventeen Hearts Festival shows the festival and education have continuously developed through virtuous cycles, making it especially meaningful.”

Yoo also stressed a vital message from the festival: “Students may struggle choosing between social innovation values and employment, but in fact, many link social innovation with career. The festival provides a space to showcase such examples and possibilities.”

The core keyword of this year's Seventeen Hearts Festival was ‘5I's(Inspiring Imagination, Inquisitive exploration, Impactful technology, Inclusive innovation, Intercultural living),’ representing five essential values Hanyang associates with social innovation.

Each value could be seen and felt across festival programs. Inspiring imagination appeared in social innovation booths and exhibits, Inquisitive exploration in talk concerts sharing alumni and speaker experiences, Impactful technology in the Tech for Impact session with Kakao, Inclusive innovation in sessions featuring Root Impact and MYSC’s specific cases, and Intercultural living permeated the festival broadly, grounded in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs).

Yoo remarked, “These five core values aren’t mere slogans; they are guiding principles interwoven throughout booths, talk concerts, sessions, and exhibitions. We hope students will experience these values and concretely design their own ‘Futuremaker’ journeys.”

This year, the Seventeen Hearts Festival collaborated with external organizations like Kakao Impact, World Vision, Root Impact, and MYSC, emphasizing that social innovation is a ‘living ecosystem’ created collaboratively by various factors.

During the 'Hanyang Social Innovation 10th Anniversary Next Impact Forum' held at Hanyang’s HIT conference room and Main Administration Building HEAT room, experiences and achievements in ‘Futuremaker Education’ were shared with Kakao Impact, Root Impact, and MYSC. The '2025 Collective Impact Forum' held at Paiknam Library and Academic Information Center’s 6th-floor international conference room showcased achievements from the ‘Safe Bathhouse Project’ jointly run with organizations including Innocean and World Vision.

What made this year’s festival special was the student planning team’s proactive leadership over every step—from setting the festival’s direction, securing booths, to promotion. Choi Seo-yoon (Chinese Language and Literature major, Senior), head of the student planning team, said, “The theme ‘Futuremaker’ was itself a process to be experienced. During the festival’s planning, I felt myself becoming a Futuremaker.”

The path wasn't always smooth. Securing partnerships with companies to make a festival accessible and enjoyable to students unfamiliar with social innovation was challenging. Choi recalled the attempt to partner with Lego, noting, “I really wanted to share Lego's social innovation values. Though we could not realize it this time, hearing the representative say ‘If possible, we’d love to join’ strongly resonated with me.” She added, “Everyone has a ‘Futuremaker’ inside, and our role might be to awaken it.”

Yoo concluded, “I was impressed by how people solve social problems through business sustainably. I hope the festival prompts students to reflect on their social innovation efforts.”She emphasized, “‘Love in Deed and Truth’ isn't a grand, vague goal, but rather choosing daily actions for others. I hope this festival becomes a starting point for everyone to live out love in their own way as a ‘Futuremaker.’”

Choi offered sincere advice based on personal experience: “It’s natural to hesitate based on previous challenges to define social innovation clearly. But when in doubt, trying it once can lead to new opportunities.”