The Chinese Children’s Fund, Taiwan’s largest private child-welfare organization, gives kids from poor or abusive families another shot at success.
Last May, The Bright Way to Success (光明行) hit bookstores across Taiwan, and the first 5,000 copies sold out in less than sixty days. The book is not the stuff of typical best-sellers. Readers won’t find ten easy ways to make quick money or hear the juicy tale of some celebrity’s rise to fame. Instead, the book offers a collection of thirty autobiographical essays by rather ordinary men and women – computer engineers, university professors, tailors, bank clerks. What sets this group apart is that each of these successful adults overcame a childhood of extreme poverty.
The writers give true-to-life accounts of what it means to grow up as a needy child. Some of the stories are painfully detailed. One writer, now a systems engineer for IBM Taiwan Corp., recounts how hunger drove him and his brother to fight: “Mother was at work. She left my younger brother and me some money to buy lunch, but there was only enough for one steamed bun. We fought each other for the bigger piece.” These people have shared their personal stories in order to inspire other needy children to persevere. And many buyers of the book have the same goal. Book sellers report that customers have bought hundreds of copies to give to needy youth.
Although the thirty authors now play vastly different roles in society, one thing brought them together: a shared sense of gratitude toward an organization called the Chinese Children’s Fund (CCF). During the most difficult periods of growing up, each writer received help from this Taichung-based non-profit organization.
CCF is Taiwan’s largest private child-welfare organization. “Our goal is to help as many children from poor or dysfunctional families as we can to overcome their problems and learn to function well in society,” says Dr. Wu Jing-jyi (吳靜吉), chairman of CCF. Wu, who has a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Minnesota, believes the most serious problem for needy or abused children is that they lack self confidence and thus have a hard time setting life goals. Also, it is often difficult for these kids to find appropriate role models. But through CCF, the children find caring, hardworking adults to look up to, many of whom grew up with similar hardships. “It is very important to help needy children build up their confidence,” says Wu. “We hope the kids can learn from the models at CCF. And we want them to know that as long as they don’t give up, there are always people willing to help.”
CCF celebrated its fortieth year in Taiwan last year. The roots of the fund, however, can be traced back to 1938, when a group of church people in Richmond, Virginia, formed China’s Children Fund to help support Chinese youths who had lost their families in World War II. During the war, the fund established forty-five children’s homes throughout China and gave aid to five thousand Chinese youths. After the war, the organization changed its name to the Christian Children’s Fund and expanded its scope to offer aid to needy children around the world.
The Christian Children’s Fund began offering aid to Taiwan in 1950, and made the island one of its official branches in 1964. All funding came initially from the United States, but the branch began raising funds locally in 1977. Eight years later, donations had grown enough to make the Taiwan branch self-sufficient. The newly independent Chinese Children’s Fund officially began in 1985.
Today, the organization has a staff of 285 social workers and administrators and 4,800 volunteers. The fund operates twenty-two family service centers, called Family Helpers, around the island. These offer a number of free or low-cost services to qualified families: counseling in child behavior and parent-child relationships, medical services, emergency care, house-cleaning and baby-sitting services, academic tutoring, and summer and winter camps for children and parents. The fund also operates Tatung Children’s Home for orphaned or abused children, located in Chungho, Taipei County.
The fund’s major projects include a child sponsorship program, to provide regular financial aid to needy children; a child protection program, to intervene in cases of child abuse; emergency aid, to offer care for poor children in medical emergencies; plus research and development and volunteer training.
The child sponsorship program has helped the most children. Begun in1950, its main purpose is to offer financial aid to poor families. Under the program, needy families can go to one of the Family Helpers around the island. There, social workers assess their need and, if help is needed, arrange sponsors for the children. Sponsors donate US$40 each month: 85 percent goes to the child’s family, the rest covers administrative costs. Sponsors may support several children, but a child can only have one sponsor. “The money is not much,” says Charles Kuo (郭東曜), national director of CCF, “but it sends children a message that there are people who care.”
More than 22,000 Taiwan children currently receive financial support from 18,000 local sponsors. In total, more than 70,000 local children have received financial aid through the program over the past forty years. In addition, CCF began sponsoring foreign children in 1987, and has already helped 4,700 overseas kids in twenty-six countries. Says Kuo, “We had taken so much in the past years, so we wanted to give back something when we were able.”
Child protection services is one of CCF’S newest and most important projects. Started in 1988, the program is designed to help abused children lead a normal life. “Child abuse – physical, mental, or sexual – exists in Taiwan as it does in other parts of the world,” Kuo says, “But it was not taken seriously because Chinese traditionally consider child abuse to be a family affair. Because of this, a lot of tragedies have happened that could have been avoided.” To find and stop cases of abuse, the fund uses a child service committee of eight hundred volunteers from service-related professions such as attorneys, doctors, teachers, and the police. These volunteers report child-abuse cases to CCF and work with families to stop abusive behavior.
Among 421 cases of child abuse recorded by CCF in 1991, 84 percent of the children were abused by parents, primarily fathers. The most common reasons cited for child abuse were an unhappy marriage, drug or alcohol addiction, mental illness, and lack of understanding about proper methods of child rearing. Sometimes the abuse is shockingly severe. In her seventeen years of social work, Phyllis Wong (翁慧圓), who now oversees CCF’S child protection services, has witnessed many new social workers become physically ill after witnessing victims of child abuse. In one case, a four-year-old girl was burned repeatedly with cigarettes. In another, two boys were chained to a sofa because the father didn’t have time to look after them. “Most parents do love their kids,” Wong stresses. “But for one reason or another, some cannot control their temper or behavior, and their children become the most convenient punching-bags.”
In severe cases, when the child is in danger of permanent physical or mental injury, CCF works with the city or county government, and sometimes the police to place the child in a foster family. But Kuo stresses that children are only removed from their families as a last resort. “The best place for children is their own families, and the best parents are their own parents,” he says. “We don’t want to take kids away unless it’s absolutely necessary. “
Currently, CCF oversees three hundred children in foster homes. For each child, the city or county government pays a foster family US$280 per month to cover living expenses and US$56 to CCF for administrative and professional services. Caring for a foster child is a difficult undertaking for most families. After years of physical or mental abuse, some children suffer from long-term behavioral problems. Many are noncommunicative, some steal or try to run away from home, and a few are violent. Even for those kids who get along well with foster parents, the arrangement is only temporary. After the crisis period is over, depending on the situation at home, children are either returned to their parents, sent to live with relatives, or placed in a children’s home. “Parents of foster children deserve a lot of respect,” says Kuo. “They give love and care to children who will soon leave them.”
One difference between foster parent systems in Taiwan and other countries, according to Kuo, is that here more emphasis is placed on reuniting parents and children as quickly as possible. When a child goes into a foster family, social workers continue working with the parents to help them establish a normal relationship with their children. If the parents are cooperative and the situation has improved, CCF will return the children to their families. Social workers then visit regularly to check the progress of the parents and children. In most cases, parents and children are reunited within a year, while in other countries the waiting period is often three or four years. Kuo adds that more than 80 percent of CCF children placed with foster parents are eventually reunited with their parents. In cases in which parents cannot or will not change their behavior, children are either sent to live with relatives or placed in Tatung Children’s Home.
Tatung differs from most of the forty children’s homes operating on the island. While the majority are organized so that all the kids live together in dormitories, Tatung and two other Taiwan children’s homes are run “family style.” This means that several children and one social worker “mother” form a family unit. The biggest advantage to this arrangement, according to Jack Kuo (郭光輝), director of Tatung, is that it gives the children a sense of belonging to a family. At the same time, such a home requires more manpower and facilities, and so is more expensive to operate. At most children’s homes, the ratio of children to social workers is 30 to 1; at Tatung, the ratio is about 10 to 1.
Tatung houses fifty kids aged five to twenty, all of whom have either lost their parents and have no relatives to turn to, or have been abused and cannot return to their parents. The children are grouped into five families, each with its own 2,200-square-foot apartment equipped with a living room, dining room, bathrooms, a study room, and bedrooms for the kids and the mothers. Children can also use the basketball court, toy room, reading room, music room, and other community facilities.
Tatung workers strive to make the family units function much like a normal family, making the daily lives of the children as similar to that of their classmates and peers as possible. The day starts with the housemother making breakfast and helping the kids get ready for school. The children come home after school to find dinner waiting, and after a short period of TV time, they do their homework before going to bed. Jack Kuo says that most children adjust well to the family-unit system in Tatung. “Generally speaking, kids who grow up in family-type homes are more active, more like those of normal families.”
The annual budget for Tatung is about US$200,000, split equally among the Taipei county government, CCF, and public donations. The income is fairly stable since the home is only responsible for raising one-third of its annual budget. Though relatively secure, Tatung’s operating budget is tight, especially in the area of salaries. This has lead to a second, more serious problem for the home. According to Jack Kuo, Tatung’s most serious problem is manpower. Currently, a staff of ten operates the home and oversees its fifty children: Kuo, one administrative assistant, one social worker, and seven mothers. Kuo says the position of full-time mother is hardest to fill. Since it requires a twenty-four-hour workday five days a week and the pay is a low US$630 per month, it is getting more and more difficult to find young women who are interested in the job.
Another problem is that some of the children want to be self-reliant too early, even before they finish their basic education, which extends through ninth grade. According to Kuo, the reason for this is the strong emphasis on material success in Taiwan society. To keep kids from dropping out of school early, Tatung encourages them to consider a number of options depending upon their interests and abilities. Those who want higher education can go on to high school, college, or university. Others are encouraged to go to military academies or professional schools. "But some of them just don’t want to wait that long,” Kuo says.
The problems at Tatung mirror those of CCF as a whole: lack of funding and manpower. Currently, the organization raises virtually all of its money from private donations. For fiscal 1991 (July 1990 to June 1991), CCF operated on about US$22.8 million, only 5 percent of which came from various city and county governments supporting the foster family program.
CCF national director Charles Kuo hopes to increase government funding in the future. “Awards are nice but money is much more practical,” he says, referring to the many awards of merit that CCF has received from the central and provincial governments. Kuo cites the Hong Kong and South Korea branches of the Christian Children’s Fund as examples. At those branches, government agencies provide 90 percent and 60 percent of funding, respectively. In the future, Kuo hopes to increase government funding to 20 percent of CCF’s annual budget –roughly the amount now spent on administrative and professional services. This would alleviate the need to use donations for CCF’s operating costs and give the children more money.
A shortage of social workers is posing another problem. The fund has approximately 180 full-time social workers, most of them university graduates with degrees in sociology or psychology. But the hours are long, the stress level is high, and the pay is lower than that of elementary school teachers. Monthly starting pay at CCF is US$880, versus US$1,000 for teachers. Kuo points out that it takes two years of on-the-job training before a social worker can be truly effective, but many employees do not stay that long. Most leave the fund as soon as they find teaching jobs. He estimates that annual turnover is 20 percent.
In the end, CCF has to rely on attracting personnel and financial support by appealing to people’s desire to give needy children a sense of hope. After all, it is this desire to help that brought the fund to Taiwan from Richmond, Virginia, more than forty years ago and helped it grow to the island’s largest child welfare association. Perhaps Ko Ming-chuan, one of the writers in The Bright Way to Success best sums up CCF’s mission: “What helped me most was not the pleasure of receiving money every month, but the encouragement of knowing there were people who really cared,” he writes. “When I got my master’s degree in the States, the first thing I wanted to do was come back to Taiwan and sponsor a child.... That process of receiving then giving back represents the never-ending cycle of life.”■