This document discusses the role of NGOs for low-income groups in Korean society. This paper describes the increasingly important role of NGOs within South Korea in demanding better conditions for low-income groups in urban areas, and the links that this new role has with the democratic movement of the 1980s and the Saemaul Undong movement that started in 1970. The paper focuses in particular on NGOs that opposed the government’s large forced eviction program in Seoul during the 1980s and early 1990s.