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Community Compass: Taipei American School, 3M take honors at dinner

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A Taipei American School (TAS) teacher and 3M Taiwan were honored with Community Leadership Awards by the Community Services Center on Friday night at the start of the center’s annual Charity Auction Dinner.

Three-hundred-and-twenty-five people attended the dinner in the Grand Hyatt Taipei ballroom, which featured both a silent and a live auction to raise money for the center’s activities.

The center is a Taipei-based non-profit organization that has offered support services to the international community in Taiwan since 1987. Three years ago, the center began a program to honor individuals and companies that have made a significant contribution, either to the international community in Taiwan, society at large or both.

This year’s honoree for individual community leadership was Richard Arnold, a history teacher at TAS since 1970, who has been the faculty sponsor of the Orphanage Club.

Under his leadership, club members have raised hundreds of thousands of US dollars over the years through book, rummage, raffle ticket and T-shirt sales to fund its many projects. These projects have included financial help and weekend outings for the Chung-Yi and Cathwel orphanages in Taipei, clothing and food donations to Aboriginal communities around Taiwan, a Christmas party for Pearl S. Buck Foundation children and donations for orphans or disaster victims in other countries.

The club also organizes tutoring groups for the Taipei School for the Visually Impaired in Tienmu and Hunger Days at TAS to raise awareness of global hunger and money for groups such as Oxfam, American Friends Service and World Vision.

Arnold has given up countless weekends and evenings in the past decades to work with thousands of high-school and junior-high club members on the club’s projects, providing them with a personal example of social responsibility. He was honored by the Taipei City Government in 2001 for his charitable work.

In his acceptance speech, however, Arnold said the award really belonged to the generations of students, their parents and TAS staff members who worked on Orphanage Club projects.

He also paid tribute to TAS custodial staff who set up the tables and other equipment needed for all the club events.

3M Taiwan received the corporate Community Leadership Award for its efforts to reduce its air emissions and waste, as well as its charitable donations and corporate social responsibility programs around Taiwan and the world.

In announcing the corporate award, Fred Voightmann, chairman of the center’s Steering Committee, said that 3M representative Alex Yu could not attend the dinner, but had asked him to say: “3M took this award both as an honor and as a motivation to keep on doing what they have been doing.”

DIANE BAKER IS A MEMBER OF THE COMMUNITY

SERVICE CENTER’S STEERING COMMITTEE

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