Jimin Lee has been working with Cedar Mill News as the final editor for all the current information you see every month—after the team gets Community News, Nature & Garden, etc. into the Google documents she gives everything a final pass. 

But she’s a young lady with many talents and recently won a Certificate of Excellence in an international competition: the 2024 ARTEFFECT competition by the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes. Her entry is a collage poster—”The Voice that Broke Them Free”—paying honor to her “unsung hero” Kim Hak-Sun, a Korean woman who “paved the way for justice for sexual violence victims,” Jimin says. She felt a connection with Hak-Sun because her family is Korean, but as she learned more, she was inspired.

The poster features an image of Hak-Sun with butterflies that Jimin drew with colored pencils. “By depicting these butterflies as carriers of hope, my goal was to symbolize the ‘comfort women’ who were given the chance to ascend from the weight of their silence and oppression, due to her actions. The chains further symbolize the boundaries that she broke, allowing their ‘escape’ to freedom,” Jimin wrote in her impact statement. 

She learned that she had won the $750 prize when she walked into her Lincoln High art class. The global competition chose 50 finalists for 2024, offering $20,000 in prizes, with a grand prize of $6,000. Jimin was one of seven awarded the Certificate of Excellence. “It was definitely unexpected at first,” Jimin said. “But then I was really grateful for the opportunity to be honest.”

Jimin partnered with another of our editing team in January for a concert to raise money and awareness for homeless students. She designed the visuals and poster for the event and Assistant Managing Editor Seojin Ha performed with others to donate money to the McKinney-Vento program.