A Lifetime of Aid: Miss Kathi and Humanitarianism in North Korea

Miss Kathi: Saving Lives in North Korea chronicles the story of Kathi Zellweger, a person with nearly three decades of engagement with North Korea’s most vulnerable populations, undaunted by the tensions and threat of conflict looming over the Korean Peninsula. 

Together with co-author Mike Chinoy, former CNN correspondent, Kathi will share her central role in the early years of international relief efforts in North Korea, having saved the lives of thousands of people—most of them children.

This program will be moderated by Melissa Dale, Ph.D, USF Department of History.

Speaker bios: 
Kathi Zellweger is a senior aid manager with over thirty years of experience in Hong Kong, China, and North Korea. She has made 75 trips to North Korea and was based in Pyongyang during 2006–2011 as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Before that, Zellweger worked in a senior post for the Catholic Agency Caritas in Hong Kong. She later established her own NGO, the Hong Kong–based KorAid Limited. Zellweger is affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and is a Non-resident Fellow at the European Center for North Korean Studies at the University of Vienna. =

Mike Chinoy is a Nonresident Scholar at the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego. Previously, he was a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute. Before joining USC, he spent twenty-four years as a foreign correspondent for CNN. He was the network’s first bureau chief in Beijing, bureau chief in Hong Kong, and senior Asia correspondent. He also worked for CBS News and NBC News in Hong Kong. Chinoy won Emmy, DuPont, Peabody, and ACE awards for his coverage of China, and also made seventeen trips to North Korea. He is the author of five other books, including two on North Korea.