A short ceremony was held in Taipei yesterday to present a new model of local community cooperative care combining trained local caregivers, convenience stores and surveys to provide instant care to elderly Taipei residents, as part of the city government’s “stone soup” long-term care program.
In addition to the 325 meal-sharing stations for elderly residents and 18 daycare centers the city government has opened, which are to be expanded to 31 in the coming two years, Taipei has also allocated NT$30 million (US$992,031) to initiate a “stone soup” program this year, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.
He said the name “stone soup” originated from a folk story about three hungry strangers who arrived in a poor village with that had a pot, but no food.
The strangers convinced the villagers that they could make a tasty “stone soup” if they could only get some missing garnishes to improve the flavor. The villagers then gave them bits of ingredients, allowing them to turn the soup into a tasty meal and share it with the villagers.
Ko said the city government is using the concept of the story to push forward a program that pools different resources in communities to meet the needs of elderly residents in those same communities.
Ko yesterday morning attended a short event in Zhongzheng (中正) District’s Xinlong Community (新隆) that was held to demonstrate a long-term care mutual-assistance circle model.
Xinlong Community is the first to combine local residents trained as primary caregivers with convenience stores that serve as information hubs for care services, and surveys to help understand the supply and demand for care services in a community, the Taipei Department of Social Welfare said.
Ko said the program was initiated in the hope that people who need care services would not need to look far, but could have them available in nearby communities, so that elderly people could live comfortably in their homes and would not be forced to live in care facilities.
If the model proves successful in select neighborhoods, the city government would try to expand it to other neighborhoods in the city, Ko 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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