Seventeen's Joshua Will Address UNESCO in Paris Next Week. He'll Be Representing More Than the Group.
On June 25, Joshua of Seventeen will take the podium at UNESCO headquarters in Paris - Room 1, 10 a.m. local time - as the group's representative at a ceremony marking the scale-up phase of the Global Youth Grant Scheme. UNESCO Director-General Khaled El-Enany will attend. The event will be livestreamed on UNESCO's official YouTube channel.
The occasion is specific: the "Going Together - For Youth Creativity and Well-Being" program that Seventeen and UNESCO have jointly promoted since the group's appointment as UNESCO Goodwill Ambassadors for Youth in June 2024. At that appointment, the 13-member group donated $1 million to establish the grant scheme, which funds youth-led projects in education, climate action, arts, mental health, and community inclusion. Tuesday's ceremony marks the program's scale-up phase - an expansion that Pledis Entertainment confirmed was partially enabled by additional fundraising from a Seventeen-organized charity auction held around International Youth Day last year. Ten youth teams selected from 100 groups participating in the Going Together program will be represented at the Paris event.
Joshua will speak in English on behalf of all thirteen members. The Korean-American member, born Hong Jisoo in Los Angeles, has delivered UNESCO addresses before, most recently at the 13th UNESCO Youth Forum in November 2023 - when Seventeen became the first K-pop act to host a special session at the forum - alongside Seungkwan, Jun, Woozi, Mingyu, and Vernon. Tuesday's announcement from Pledis names Joshua as the sole representative for the June 25 ceremony.
The program's beneficiaries give a clearer picture of where the $1 million grant has traveled. Among the participating youth leaders confirmed for the Paris event: Mary Rose Pagador, who built a community library from scratch in Barangay Particion in the Philippines - 600 books, 350 beneficiaries - within a year. The project sits alongside others in climate, mental health, and digital inclusion from across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa.
Seventeen's institutional engagement with UNESCO now runs three years deep. The 2023 Youth Forum appearance came before the ambassadorial appointment, which itself came before the grant scheme, which now arrives at a scale-up phase with a second Seventeen-funded expansion. The arc is less a celebrity endorsement and more a sustained organizational partnership - the kind K-pop groups rarely build with international bodies, and that UNESCO has not previously built with a K-pop act. The June 25 ceremony begins at 10 a.m. Paris time, 5 p.m. KST.
