Connecting Dots into Net, New Taipei embodies a Caring Community

The Labor Affairs Department designed a series of cards translating basic communicating words in both languages,  to help foreign laborers and employers express to each other.
 
People are the essence of a city. As the most populous metropolis in Taiwan, New Taipei City embraces its diversity of peoples, and dedicates to fulfill the happiness and well-being of everyone in the City. The Government’s innovative empowering programs since 2010 have successfully created a safe, equal, citizen centric, and caring community.
 
Nowadays many cities and countries are encountering unprecedented social challenges. Due to the changing lifestyle in a dynamic business environment with highly frequent information exchanges, urban individuals ironically get more isolated than anytime before. It’s an irresistible tendency in the cyber generation that people are spiritually further from each other while they are getting physically closer. Some people in need, such as the elders who live alone, children raised in disadvantaged families, new migrants and international blue collar laborers, are mute in society because they lose connection to the mainstream world.
 
However, New Taipei believes every citizen has a right to voice out and its citizens are ready to embrace the others who share the city with them. Therefore, how to connect people who just need a chance to understand each other is the most critical task for the city government to ensure that everyone’s need is equal.
 
For the senior citizens living alone, the Government works with local NGOs and district offices to organize “potlucks”, so that the elderly meet up regularly at these congregate dining events. The key function of “congregate dining program” is not only to make sure that the elderly eat healthy and balanced nutritious food, but also to connect every individual to each other, to the community, and to the social safety web. Now there are 841 groups of mutual caring and exchanging forged by such programs. In New Taipei, senior citizens live healthily and happily together.
 
For the children from disadvantaged families who have trouble with daily meals, “Happiness Protection Station” offers a quick and simple solution at 2000+ convenient stores all around the city. Children in need can reach out to any convenient store and have free warm food. Meanwhile, the information of the children is reported to Social Welfare Department’s database to timely identify those in needs so that the intervention can be extended preemptively.
 
For new immigrants and international laborers in New Taipei, the Government’s various innovative programs help them settle in the City. For example, Mandarin lessons are offered by the Government to foreign-born parents, whose children can learn at school the languages of their parents, such as Vietnamese, Thai, and Indonesian for better communication; the Labor Affairs Department holds cultural and sports events for foreign workers and their employers in order to make more connections beyond work.
 
“It takes a village to raise a child.” It is always a key factor of well-functioning social safety web that no one is excluded from the watch of the community and society. Therefore, the Government is trying to link the citizens, especially those in need, to a bigger and firmer organism, which the City creates and expects to implement a caring community.   
 
New Taipei is on the way to be a city of resilience and equality, and never gives up the minority and the vulnerable. With integrated solutions and smart ideas, the City has already been recognized as a successfully transformed city from a industrialized area to a livable and people-centric community.