The efforts of government authorities must be integrated if they are to assist local community development, ROC Culture Minister Lung Ying-tai said July 24.
“The challenge for the Ministry of Culture is to inject culture-centered thinking into different agencies and help Taiwan’s 7,835 villages realize their visions for their own communities,” Lung said at an MOC-organized national forum in New Taipei City.
A community empowerment movement has been under way in Taiwan since the 1990s, when the Council for Cultural Affairs—the MOC’s predecessor—first encouraged individual villages to source grassroots power to create their own culture and industries.
Although the budget regularly earmarked for community development projects has been relatively small, Lung said, other government agencies have similar funds. The Council of Agriculture’s NT$150 billion (US$4.96 billion) 10-year farming village revival project, for example, could join forces with the MOC, she added.
“Today’s problem with community empowerment work does not lie with money, but with people,” Liao Chia-chan, chairman of the Nantou County-based Homeland Foundation, remarked at the forum.
“The movement has come to a stage where transformation and new blood is required for sustainable village development,” he said.
Liao has spearheaded community revival and empowerment work in Nantou’s Taomi Village since the Sept. 11, 1999 earthquake devastated the area. Taomi has become a model for other villages.
He said overdependence on government sponsorship has proven to be detrimental to community development. “What a village needs is a collective vision that will bring people together in a common effort,” he said, adding that otherwise, any cultural work would end up being steered by outside influences, such as when the central government changes hands.
Renowned hotelier Stanley Yen said people, and particularly the young, play a major role in any community work, yet population drain is a major problem for villages now.
Yen established the Alliance Cultural Foundation in 2010 to encourage young people from eastern Taiwan to return home and develop a united development model unique to their region.
Lung said the ministry would play a facilitating role between villages and related government agencies, as well as creating conditions to draw young people back home. (THN)