The Bookhouse Cafe, set to open tomorrow in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華), is to become the city’s first “social-purpose corporation” to shelter struggling young people.
It is a result of the city government’s participatory budgeting policy. The city government on Friday said that 63 projects chosen by Taipei residents on the city’s i-Voting online polling platform had been deemed feasible by city government agencies.
The Bookhouse Cafe, proposed by Zhongqing Borough (忠勤) Warden Fang Ho-sheng (方荷生), was among the proposals.
Fang said Wanhua, commonly known as Monga, its Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) name, has the highest concentration of teenagers who have legal troubles and that the project aims to help them find purpose and lead a self-sufficient life.
Two years ago, he teamed up with the Youth Counseling Committee Zhongzheng Division, hiring certified baristas to teach at-risk teenagers how to make coffee in a house owned by the Ministry of Defense, Fang said.
He has taken in about 20 teenagers so far, of which four have passed barista certification tests administered by the UK-based City and Guilds Group, he said.
The teenagers wanted to make money with their skills, but civilians are not allowed to conduct business on the ministry-owned property, Fang said.
Fang said he leased two storefronts next to the Nanjichang Night Market, which he turned into the Bookhouse Cafe.
Fang said the four teenagers will brew coffee there and help baristas give brewing lessons to at-risk teenagers.
The cafe will continue working with City and Guilds so that anyone interested in becoming a barista can sign up for lessons at the cafe and take a certification test there after paying a fee, Fang said.
Fang said he had requested NT$4 million (US$126,171) from the city’s participatory budget to subsidize the teenagers’ salaries, lecturers’ fees and the rent for the property.
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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