Publish Date: 06/01/2004
Story Type: SOCIETY; COMMUNITY
Byline: GRAHAM NORRIES

PHOTOS BY HUANG CHUNG-HSIN

With thousands of worthwhile causes competing for the public purse, many smaller charities are turning to business as a way to make a difference.

The Sunshine Social Welfare Foundation's gas station provides employment for burn victims and also raises funds for their treatment.
 

When Chen Zhong-ji left prison two years ago, his prospects of finding a job were dismal. He had just completed 11 years of a prison sentence and his only previous job experience was collecting debts for gangsters, a line of work that does not look good on a CV.

Luckily for Chen, he discovered the Taiwan After-Care Association, a charity devoted to helping ex-convicts find work. Chen got a job in a hot pot restaurant in Chungho, Taipei County, which was set up by one of the association's counselors with a NT$1.25 million (US$37,879) loan from the association.

While the partly government-funded association is not poor, donations from the public are hard to attract. Schemes such as the one that employed Chen significantly reduce the association's outlays--and also help it reach its goal of coaxing former criminals back into society. Nevertheless, its resources contrast with a local rival, the Buddhist Compassionate Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, Taiwan's biggest charity, with an endowment of more than NT$12 billion (US$363.6 million) and operations around the world.

In fact, the Tzu Chi Foundation is so dominant, so effective at attracting funds, that it makes it difficult for smaller charities to survive on donations from the public. One critic even goes so far as to call the Buddhist charity a "vacuum cleaner" of resources. But then life has never been easy for charities in Taiwan. Before the 1980s, the government all but banned new non-profit organizations for fear they would challenge its authority. And, then with the lifting of martial law in 1987, thousands (more than 15,000 membership-based associations and 3,000 endowment-based foundations) of non-profit organizations have sprung into existence, all of them competing for a slice of government, public, and private-sector money.

The rise of what is known as the non-profit sector in Taiwan was possible thanks to a confluence of economic, political, and societal factors, according to Michael Hsiao, a sociology professor at National Taiwan University and national policy adviser to the president. Hsiao believes the expansion of the public education system has aroused social consciousness; while economic development means people spend less time worrying about their basic needs and more time pursuing social reform. Meanwhile, affluence, he says, has allowed people to travel abroad more, which, combined with better access to mass media, has expanded the horizons of the middle class and enabled them to pursue reform.

"The development of a civil society has gone hand in hand with socio-political changes," says Hsiao. "It's really hard to separate them. The common belief is that political liberalization helped the NGO sector develop. That's not the case; it was the NGOs that helped foster political democratization."

At a business run by the Children Are Us Foundation, a mentally handicapped man makes sandwiches.
 

Taiwan's oldest foundation, the Tung-Shin Social Welfare Foundation, was set up in 1833, long before martial law or even the Republic of China. But Tung-Shin is a rare exception. Three out of four third-sector associations existing today were set up in the past 20 years. And as the number has grown, so has the variety, with non-profit organizations dealing with issues as diverse as women's rights, facial disfigurement, and dance education. Meanwhile, towering over them all is the Tzu Chi Foundation, which was established in 1966 by Cheng Yen, a Buddhist nun who was moved to action after seeing a miscarriage occur at a hospital because a woman did not have the funds to pay for treatment.

With its goal of transforming the "four immeasurables" kindness, compassion, joy, and giving-into actions through the "four major missions": charity, medicine, education, and culture, Tzu Chi is a massive international operation that offers disaster relief from California to Kabul--and it does it almost exclusively through donations from members of the public.

But, according to Hsiao, Tzu Chi's success also reflects a Taiwanese tendency to give to only two causes: disasters and religion. He attributes this to the Buddhist psychology of buying merit: "'I give money and I can be blessed in the next life,'" says Hsiao, adding that in extreme cases Taiwanese will only give to temples. "They don't trust lawyers, they don't trust scholars, they only trust the master."

As a result, cultural foundations find themselves entirely at the mercy of government handouts. The National Culture and Arts Foundation, which was set up by the government under the direction of the Arts Council, a government agency, for example, lives off interest from a government fund. In return, the Arts Council appoints the foundation's 21 board members, and all the foundation's budgets and proposals have to be scrutinized by the central government.

"Without government funding we wouldn't have a foundation in the first place," says Becky Cho, director of resource development at the foundation. "It would take years to get this kind of money from the private sector."

No surprise, then, that the situation is even more challenging for smaller charities. "Fundraising is always a problem," says Hsiao. "In Taiwan," he adds, "corporate donations only go to the more conservative foundations," which forces the smaller operations to fend for themselves.

Enter the September 21 earthquake of 1999 that killed more than 2,300 people, mostly in central Taiwan. According to Mary Pelchat, an assistant researcher at the Himalaya Foundation, which collects and publishes information about NPOs, the outpouring of charity that catastrophe evoked in Taiwan has resulted in a subsequent fall-off in donations. "At that time a lot of money [was] donated to NPOs, but people started to give less, because they thought they'd already given a lot."

It is an environment that leaves many charities with little choice but to go into business. Options include bakeries, restaurants, carwashes, and gas stations, says Pelchat, adding that they often provide "work opportunities to people left out of the regular job market, like the handicapped, single mothers or aboriginal people."

Among the thousands of charities jostling for public support in Taiwan are associations that provide non-vocational training.
 

The Sunshine Social Welfare Foundation, which provides financial support, counseling services, and physical rehabilitation to people disfigured by burns, is one example. It set up a carwash in 1992 to raise funds and provide work for some of the 1,200 people who come to it for help every year.

Jamie Wang, head of promotion at the foundation, says that the carwash has suffered from increased competition recently, but that sales at a gas station the foundation opened last year in Taipei was now ranked second in the city. And that is good news for the burn victims who seek help from the foundation, says Wang. Profits from the business now account for 25 to 30 percent of the foundation's NT$60 million (US$1.8 million) revenue, with 53 percent coming from public donations and the rest from government subsidies.

A degree of financial independence, says Wang, is in the interest of any charity.

"If you depend on the government too much, they will have a very strong influence on the identity of the foundation," she says. "We want to keep their contribution to less than 30 percent, so the gas station means a lot to us."

The Sunshine Social Welfare Foundation is not alone. At the Taiwan After-Care Association's Chungho hot pot restaurant, Chen Zhong-ji turned out to be such a good employee he moved on to become manager at a new restaurant the association helped set up in Sindian, Taipei County. Today he is a role model for other ex-convicts who work under him.

Owner Xu Cai-xia admits that some of her ex-convict staff only last a few days. But, she says, Chen is proof that it is still worth giving them a chance--and proof that charities need not rely on handouts.

Copyright (C) 2004 by Graham Norris.