When four Taipei City Government councilors wrongfully accused the Children Are Us Foundation (喜憨兒社會福利基金會) of exploiting its workers with developmental disabilities, at a press conference last month, the group saw its hard-won reputation crumble overnight.
Its offices were flooded with phone calls from concerned citizens demanding to know how their money was spent. Orders for Children Are Us Bakery items from corporations were canceled and donations were withdrawn.
Children Are US was accused by the councilors of paying workers under the minimum wage. But in fact, the group had to provide oversight for its workers and was not making a profit and thereby breaking the terms of its charity charter.
PHOTO: FANG BIN-ZHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
"To a non-profit organization like us, good image and accountability are our core values. Once they are questioned, the very existence of the organization will fall apart," Children Are Us Foundation CEO Wu Ting-fang (
Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs) are usually charity organizations whose primary objective is to support matters of public concern. They don't operate to generate profit. NPOs can been seen as a powerful supplement to government inefficiency and inflex-ibility, in terms of social welfare services and distribution of resources.
In Taiwan, there are tens of thousands of such organizations that are funded by donations from private and public sectors. However, without well-defined regulations and a central body to supervise the operation of groups like Children Are Us, such incidents are likely to happen again. And once the general public loses faith in a group because of misunderstandings about the law and how it is supposed to operate then it will likely collapse and this will obviously impact on the people it was intended to help.
Underpaid or overpaid?
Thankfully, a newly established alliance of local NPOs, the Taiwan NPO Self-Regulation Alliance (台灣公益團體自律聯盟), is setting out some improvements. Founded one year ago by 31 not-for-profit groups such as the Eden Social Welfare Foundation (伊甸社會福利基金會), the Red Cross Society of the ROC (中華民國紅十字會) and United Way of Taiwan (中華社會福利聯合勸募協會), the alliance was officially established two weeks ago and already has over 60 members who have joined together to develop a transparent and accountable mechanism for donating and fund raising.
As Feng Yen (
If only things were that simple.
The only law that regulates NPO operations is the united fund raising regulation which went into effect in 1953. The regulation was intended to limit the government's fund raising efforts for the purpose of entertaining the armed forces. As the country became more wealth in the late 1960s and early 1970s, local NPOs began to thrive and the fund raising regulation was the only law they had to comply with.
The Social Affairs Department of the Ministry of the Interior oversees the application of the fund raising law, but it neither has the resources nor the manpower to supervise such a huge body of social groups.
"If you are a law-abiding group and try to follow the regulations, the agency will keep a close eye on you. But if you don't care about the law and just go fund raising your own way, you will be fine until something goes wrong and then you are on every news channel. Then the agency will pay more attention on you," Feng said.
Such was the situation in the pre-1999 period.
In the spotlight
Six years ago, the 921 earthquake destroyed many people's homes and also brought to light the fact that the fund raising regulations were seriously out of keeping with the times. The disorderly management of relief funds made people start to ask questions about where there donations were going.
A fund raising bill was drafted after the earthquake that aimed to create a better environment for both NPOs and those who make donations. The bill also places restrictions on fund raising campaigns initiated by the government.
But, six years later, the bill still lies under pile at the Legislative Yuan waiting to be passed.
The Taiwan NPO Self-Regulation Alliance, therefore, has come at a good time. It has two objectives: to push through fund raising bill legislation and to promote self-imposed higher standards on NPOs that will ensure transparency and accountability.
Self-reforming
"Apart from the legal regulations, NPOs themselves need to establish a mechanism for the general public to have access to the operations of the organizations. People have the right to know how the money is raised, how it is managed and what the group has done and achieved with the funds," Feng said.
One source of possible abuse by NPOs lies in the fact that many of them shun their duty to make their financial reports public. According to statistics gathered by the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (
The alliance is urging charity groups to disclose their financial reports and allow public access to information.
Charity begins at home
According to Feng, more than 50 percent of the total amount of annual donations goes to major religious groups, while United Way of Taiwan, the only fundraising organi-zation that distributes funds to smaller NPOs, takes around NT$100 to NT$200 million, of the total NT$42 billion pie.
For small-to-medium-sized organizations, the alliance offers an agency for growth through counseling and exper-ience and information-sharing. Not only can these groups gain legal and financial information and know-how, but they can also become more visible through the alliance's assistance.
"Most of our members to date are small- and medium-size groups. But if we can all live up to these standards and let the public know this is how it should be done, then we can place pressure on major NPOs to fulfill their obligations to be transparent and accountable," Feng said.
As for the general public, the alliance also sets a goal for public education.
"Givers should also be smart consumers. If people know it's their right to find out whether or not their money is used efficiently and sensibly, then NPOs will have to pay more attention to accountability if they want to seek recognition and support," Feng said.
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
These are volatile times for the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), with the party’s founder, Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), in and out and back in jail repeatedly, Ko resigning as party chair and naming TPP caucus convener Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) to replace him and an upcoming party leadership vote. How representative of the party’s supporters has the party’s leadership been recently? The TPP caucus in the legislature is so closely aligned — and votes so similarly to — the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that they are in effect a pan-blue party now. Billing themselves as the “white force” between the pan-blue and pan-green
RSS