The Taiwan Fund for Children and Families is selling a notebook produced with author and playwright Caffeine (咖啡因) to help disadvantaged students in Hualien County raise money for tuition.
According to figures compiled by the foundation’s Hualien branch, 70 percent of disadvantaged families in Hualien supported by the foundation have a monthly household income of less than NT$20,000, while 25 percent of those families earn less than NT$10,000 every month.
To make matters worse, more than 80 percent of the children from these families study at private institutions, according to the survey.
There are more than 1,000 students from disadvantaged families in the county, for whom the summer vacation means taking on a part-time job to be able to pay tuition fees and support their families, the fund’s Hualien office director Chen Ching-hui (陳清輝) said.
Chen said students turned to the foundation for help as they are concerned about a potential fee hike in the next academic year and are desperately looking for part-time jobs.
He said that Caffeine decided to help after learning of the charitable services the fund has provided in the county.
“I thought I could lend a hand,” she said.
She wrote the text for the notebook and called on her friends to help her complete the project.
Photographer Chang Pi-chang (章必昌) contributed to the design with photographs of Taiwanese landscapes and Taida Print Co general manager Liu Ming-hsiung (劉銘雄) paid the printing costs, she said.
The notebooks cost NT$350 each and people purchasing three notebooks or more can receive free postage, Chen said.
The foundation is encouraging stores to stock the notebooks and is also calling on the public to purchase them and show support for the students, Chen said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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