💡 Quick Summary
- 2,941 employees from SK Innovation and its affiliates joined H2 V-Week. Over 12 days, from September 7 to 18, they contributed 9,899 hours across a wide range of activities.
- From sharing a meal to mapping a neighborhood for people with limited mobility. Employees chose the programs that spoke to them, including Meal Sharing, blood donation, Guardians of Biodiversity, Happy Dream, and Nanum Mate.
- More ways in, whatever your schedule. Employees picked their own activities and dates, on site or remotely.
One cloudless afternoon in September, the light outside my office window looked almost unreasonably good. I resisted the urge to walk straight out into it and opened my work planner instead. Meetings, an appointment across town, then more meetings. I was hunting for a free slot when a company notice caught my eye: sign-ups were open for Vol-keting, V-Week’s booking event and a mash-up of volunteering and ticketing.
“Meal Sharing and Guardians of Biodiversity are on the same day. I want to do both. How am I supposed to choose?”
Whenever a volunteer opportunity goes out, the date is the first thing I check. Around here, I’m what you’d call a volunteering enthusiast. So when I heard that V-Week was coming around again — the week when employees across SK Innovation and its affiliates volunteer together — I pushed the work planner aside and reached for my volunteer diary.
Vol-keting worked a little like booking concert tickets. You picked the activity, picked the date, and signed up before the spots went. The options ran from cooking meals for neighbors to caring for green spaces to spending an afternoon with children with developmental disabilities. Some I could join from home. The longer I scrolled, the longer my list grew — of things I wanted to try, and of people I wanted to meet.
Before long, the stories started filling in around the plans. A few sites were too far for me to reach, so I wrote down what my colleagues did there instead. By the end, the diary was full. Here are some of the pages.
| 9,899 Hours, One Choice at a Time
SK Innovation holds V-Week twice a year, once in each half, bringing together employees from across the company and its affiliates. For the second V-Week of 2026, activities ran from September 7 to 18.
Volunteers chose the causes they cared about and the kind of work they wanted to do. They could show up in person when their schedule allowed, or take part remotely when it didn’t. That flexibility is what makes volunteering fit into an ordinary week — whether you’re returning to something familiar or trying it for the first time.
Over 12 days, 2,941 employees contributed a total of 9,899 hours. Every one of those hours started as somebody’s decision to sign up. Together, they tell the story of H2 2026 V-Week.
Diary Entry 1 | A Warm Meal, a Familiar Face, and the Gift of Life
Lunchtime approaches at a free meal center. The volunteers finish cooking, then serve each person who comes through the door.
Since 2024, Meal Sharing has provided hot meals to older adults and neighbors who struggle to eat well because of financial hardship, isolation, or ill health. The program continued through both halves of 2026, and as of late September, volunteers had run 189 meal services across Seoul, Daejeon, Seosan, and Jeungpyeong.
On September 17, Myeong Seong, CEO of SK Earthon, joined employees at the Jongno Free Meal Center in Seoul. Volunteers from several affiliates prepared and served the food and cleaned up afterward. They also asked people how they’d been and stayed to talk, the way you would with family. It’s the part that doesn’t show up in the numbers, and the part people remember.
A greeting over lunch can turn into something that lasts. Sharing Happiness, Carrying on Love pairs employees with older adults living alone and brings the same people together again and again. Launched in 2016, it’s now in its tenth year. This time, the pairs went shopping together ahead of Chuseok. Over the years, volunteers have listened to their partners’ stories and kept an eye out for the small difficulties of daily life. But the heart of it is simpler than that: someone is coming back, and they’ll ask how you’ve been.
Some volunteers cared for their neighbors by rolling up their sleeves. The Happiness Sharing Blood Donation ran in Seoul, Daejeon, Seosan, and Ulsan, and employees who donated on their own time outside company events could count those hours too.
Meal Sharing and Sharing Happiness, Carrying on Love put you face to face with the person you’re helping. Donating blood is the opposite: somewhere down the line, it helps a stranger you’ll never meet get through treatment and recover.
Diary Entry 2 | Caring for Nature and and Remembering Who Walked It First
On an ordinary walk through the park, I’d barely register the plants along the path. Before a volunteer day, I look at them differently. Somewhere in all that summer growth are invasive species quietly crowding out the native ones.
This fall, Guardians of Biodiversity focused on stopping that spread. Volunteers combed through green spaces, identified invasive plants, removed them, and made room for native species to take hold again. Learning to tell apart plants that look nearly identical at a glance did more than tidy up the scenery — it helped protect the balance of a local ecosystem. Counting the sessions held in Seoul and Daejeon earlier in the year, the program has now run 35 times.
Volunteers also spent time in a place of remembrance. Guardians of the Cemetery, introduced during the first V-Week of 2026, returned to the National Daejeon Memorial Cemetery on September 9 and 16. Volunteers tended the graves and the grounds around them and placed Korean flags at each site, honoring those who gave their lives defending the country and fighting for its independence. The work was quiet and physical, and it left time to think about what those lives were given for.
Happiness Sharing Plogging turns an ordinary commute, walk, or run into something useful. Volunteers pick up litter as they go, whether they’re out with the dog or getting some air with colleagues. SK Innovation and its affiliates have kept these cleanups going at worksites in Korea and overseas.
At SK Battery America (SKBA), employees had been clearing the roadside along SK Boulevard all year. During V-Week, they headed out for another cleanup of 2026. There’s something particular about tending the same stretch of road over and over — it stops being a task and starts being yours. By the end, everyone had worked up a sweat, and the walk back was lighter than the walk out.
Diary Entry 3 | Popcorn, Handball, Music to Cheer the Dreams of Children with Developmental Disabilities
One by one, children arrived in the theater lobby with a bucket of popcorn in each hand, and the volunteers were already waiting.
A Day Out at the Movies with Children with Developmental Disabilities took place in Seoul on September 15 and Daejeon on September 17. Everyone watched the film together, laughed in the same places, and argued about it afterward. Sharing a story and then talking about what you thought of it is an easy, natural way to connect — which is exactly the point.
SK Innovation has been running cultural outings like this through Happy Dream since 2016. The program helps children with developmental disabilities grow more comfortable in social settings and more independent, through movie outings, handball classes, and trips to zoos and botanical gardens. New places, new people, and room to find out what they’re curious about.
At the Happy Dream Handball Class, every catch and every throw is a small win. SK Sugar Gliders developed the curriculum together with the Department of Special Physical Education at Korea National Sport University, designing it specifically for children with developmental disabilities. Employees pair off with the kids to run, play, and talk. Along with fitness and coordination, the children practice following rules and playing as a team.
In Incheon, SK Incheon Petrochem worked with the Incheon Seo-gu Community Rehabilitation Center on its Hopeful Sports Class, where children with developmental disabilities tried basketball, soccer, and other sports with professional coaches.
In Daejeon, the company held Volume UP, Empathy UP, a concert built to raise awareness of developmental disabilities. It grew out of a decade of work: SK Innovation has organized and sponsored the nationwide Great Music Festival (GMF), a stage for musicians with developmental disabilities, and the tenth GMF took place on September 1 this year.
Different formats, same idea. When the kids and the volunteers were laughing at the same scene or passing a ball across the gym, the gap between ages and job titles stopped mattering. The children came away with new experiences. The employees came away seeing how differently — and at what different speeds — people take in the world.
Diary Entry 4 | Understanding Mobility Barriers and Bringing Safter Places to Visit
After a good handball session, I was about to duck into a café with some colleagues when I stopped at the entrance. One low step. I’d have crossed it without noticing a month ago. For someone using a wheelchair or a walker — or pushing a stroller, or just moving slowly that day — it decides whether they come in at all.
Since 2025, SK Innovation has worked with Stair Crusher Club on Road Maker, a volunteer program that collects accessibility information about shops, cafés, and other businesses so that people with limited mobility can go out more easily and with less guesswork. Volunteers can add an entry through the Stair Crusher Club app anytime, anywhere. Each one helps somebody decide where they can go this weekend.
On September 18, twenty single employees in their 20s and 30s from SK Innovation and Daesang Corporation met for the first time in Seongsu-dong, Seoul. This was Nanum Mate (나눔메이트), a Road Maker event planned by SK Innovation and Stair Crusher Club with operational support from Daesang Corporation. Nanum is Korean for sharing, and a mate is who you share it with. The idea was straightforward: bring together employees from two companies who had never met, give them something worth doing, and let the rest follow.
It began with a short session on what limited mobility actually means day to day. Then everyone was paired off — one from SK Innovation, one from Daesang — and sent out around Seoul Forest to check entrances, steps, and doorways and record what they found. They picked up litter as they went, since they were already out walking. Mostly, they talked, which is easier to do beside someone than across a table from them.
By the end of the afternoon, the app was 109 entries richer. Whatever else came of the day, the organizers were too discreet to ask.
Diary Entry 5 | Doing What You’re Already Good at to Help Others
Some volunteering doesn’t look like volunteering. It looks like proofreading.
Through a remote activity to produce accessible e-books, volunteers worked through the guidelines and then checked punctuation, line breaks, and typos, one line at a time. Their edits turned the files into something people with visual impairments could listen to or read in braille. Small corrections, carefully made — that’s what stands between a book and everyone who can’t currently read it.
The Pro Bono program also returned in the second half of the year. Volunteers tried out products from social enterprises and social ventures, then gave detailed feedback on features and usability. The organizations get insight they can act on. The volunteers get to put their professional skills toward something with a longer reach than a quarterly target.
Some people help with their hands, some with what they know. What matters is finding the version that fits what you’re already good at — and V-Week gave everyone across SK Innovation and its affiliates a way to do that.
| The Last Line: A Promise
The activities wrapped up, but H2 2026 V-Week hasn’t quite ended. Two follow-ups are keeping it going: I Like You, where employees write notes of thanks and encouragement to the colleagues they volunteered alongside, and I Like Volunteering, where they share photos of the moments that stuck with them. The messages and pictures have been coming in steadily since August 25, and the boards stay open through September 30.
They show people sides of their colleagues that never come up at work. And they do something else, too: one person’s photo is often enough to make somebody else start planning.
“May I never forget how I feel today and keep giving back!”
That’s what I wrote on the last line of my volunteer diary. It started out as nothing but dates and program names. It ends up holding the care that went into a meal, the noise of a gym full of kids, and a single step outside a café that I’ll never walk past the same way again.
Twelve days, and V-Week is over. We volunteered at different times, in different cities, at different things. What brought us there is still going. SK Innovation will keep showing up alongside its employees, and there are plenty of pages left to fill.
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