Daegu Youth Retreat Center

History & origins

The Daegu Metropolitan City Youth Training Center opened on December 9, 1994, as a representative youth-training facility of Daegu Metropolitan City. In August 2002, the Daegu Catholic Youth Foundation assumed commissioned operation of the center, and in November of the same year the Apsan Education and Culture Center was opened. From that point, the present structure took shape, combining a public youth facility with the operating experience of a Catholic youth-specialist organization.

In 2003 the center expanded its activities with a winter overseas cultural exchange program for young people, and it subsequently continued to develop experiential, career, cultural, and international-exchange programs. Its official materials state that it was repeatedly selected as a top-rated youth training facility between 2008 and 2022.

Since its opening, the center has functioned as part of the public infrastructure for youth policy, while from 2002 onward the Daegu Catholic Youth Foundation has participated as the operating body. Its history is therefore best understood not as the establishment of a specifically Catholic facility, but as a long-term partnership in which Catholic youth-ministry and educational expertise became integrated into a youth center established by the city government.