Experiencing Return Gifts and Donating to Hometowns: 1st Hometown Love Festa Concludes

From sweet and sour fruits to return gifts highlighting the unique characteristics of each region.

Visitors explore and experience a variety of specialty products prepared at each booth.

The first-ever Hometown Love Festa, jointly hosted this year by SBS and the Ministry of the Interior and Safety to promote hometown love donations, drew crowds of visitors from the Seoul metropolitan area.

In this event, about 60 local governments nationwide participated to showcase their respective regions' representative specialty products and promote their areas.

[Jeon Jae-hyung / Festa Participant: I found out about (the Hometown Love Donation System) for the first time today. I learned how many different return gifts each region offers....]

Many people at the site also participated in donations through the Hometown Love e-um website.

[Kim Min-jae / Vice Minister of the Interior and Safety: I am an honorary citizen of Jeju. Since there was a Jeju booth, I decided to make a donation, not a large amount, out of affection for Jeju.]

A live YouTube broadcast introducing representative return gifts from each region surpassed 10,000 concurrent viewers, reflecting passionate interest in hometown love donations.

[Please show a lot of love for our Muan. Go hometown love donation system!]

Free tax counseling sessions were also held to explain how much tax benefit donors can receive when donating to their hometowns.

[Goo Jae-i / President of the Korea Certified Public Tax Accountants Association: When you make a hometown love donation, you can receive a full refund up to 100,000 won, and you also receive return gifts equivalent to 30% of the donation amount....]

The hometown love donation funds are evaluated as serving as a vital catalyst to revive local economies in small regional cities suffering from a lack of tax revenue.

[Shin Seung-geun / President of the Korea Local Tax Research Institute: Unlike other donations, there are no restrictions on how the funds are used, so residents can use them for the welfare programs they want. I think the hometown love donation system is a great system that can bring substantial financial resources to local regions in the future.]

At a Korea-Japan international seminar held as a sideline event, participants shared the cases and experiences of Japan's hometown tax system—which introduced the system earlier—and sought development strategies for South Korea's hometown love donation system, which is now in its fourth year.

(Reported by Hong Seung-yeon, Video by Lim Dong-guk, Video Editing by Ahn Yeo-jin, VJ: Kim Hyung-jin, Produced by SBS Digital News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.