Located along Tai­pei’s “Jian­guo Strip” is a microcosm of the work being done by public interest organizations in Taiwan to transform from relying mainly on charity to becoming financially self-supporting.

If you start at the southern tip of Jian­guo South Road (just south of He­ping East Road) and head north, as you travel in the shadow of the elevated highway you will pass a series of “sheltered employment” businesses (which we will call SEBs), which means businesses whose purpose is to provide guaranteed employment to disabled people. First comes a full-service carwash and auto accessories operation run by the Sunshine Social Welfare Foundation, followed quickly by a gas station operated by the Victory Potential-Development Center for the Disabled. Farther along you will come across a carwash belonging to the Yu-Cheng Social Welfare Foundation and a food store/restaurant that is part of the OrganicYam chain.

The SEBs that line Jian­guo all the way north to Min­quan East Road provide over 200 jobs in which the physically and mentally disabled can bring their talents into play. There is an air of purposeful labor and well-earned happiness.

“Dialogue in the Dark TPE” is a firm set up by the Taiwan Foundation for the Blind to create more jobs for those without sight. Visually-impaired instructors offer courses that open up a completely new world of sensory experience.

The Sunshine Foundation carwash was Taiwan’s first-ever SEB, and pioneered the SEB presence along the Jian­guo Strip. When it was first founded back in 1992 as a means to provide jobs for victims of severe burns or facial disfigurements, it attracted a great deal of media attention. Many consumers were touched by the spirit of the workers—their willingness to overcome their handicaps and challenge themselves—and routinely made trips there just to get their cars washed. Non-profit organizations across Taiwan that wanted to become self-supporting patterned themselves after Sunshine.

Nonetheless, as the carwash market became saturated, businesses with only limited services lost competitiveness. Therefore Sunshine began diversifying into other services, such as selling car accessories and pumping gas. Victory and Yu-Cheng followed suit, step by step getting into lines of business like data entry, baked goods, and chain stores, trying to make it possible for disadvantaged people with different physical and mental characteristics to all find suitable jobs.

Chou Wen-chen, executive director for the Bjør­gaas Foundation, offers the following analysis: “Charitable organizations in Taiwan have never been very good at being competitive. But now they have to learn how to do things like analyzing returns on investment, coordinating social resources, and the like. They can’t just appeal to people’s sympathy. They have to combine their ideals with product value in order to get consumer support for the long haul. Transforming SEBs into sustainable social enterprises has become their best option.”

Public interest organizations in Taiwan are nowadays adopting one of two courses of action to make the transition to social enterprise. One is to raise the competitiveness of SEBs, “throw away the crutches,” and compete head to head with for-profit businesses by providing better quality and value. The best known example of this approach is the First Social Welfare Foundation. Giving outstanding service, they bid against for-profit firms for public-sector contracts for janitorial services.

The second model is for organizations to found a subsidiary social enterprise outside of their own organization, then use the enterprise to transplant successful foreign business models into Taiwan. The Taiwan Foundation for the Blind, for example, founded “Dialogue in the Dark TPE,” introducing courses in “experiencing blindness” that have become so famous in the West, and focusing specifically on the market for development of employable potential.

The “Jianguo Strip” in Taipei City is the birthplace of businesses opened by charitable organizations, and operations there today include car washes, automobile accessories shops, gas stations, and an organic foods chain store, all offering “sheltered employment” to the differently abled.

The First Social Welfare Foundation (FSWF) is a public interest group concerned for the disabled and their families, founded in 1980 by a group of university professors specializing in special education. It devotes particular attention to early intervention, training in life skills, and employment assistance. The FSWF has also devised many new teaching materials and techniques, and over the past 30-plus years has provided services to more than 10,000 beneficiaries.

In contrast to many parental organizations that loudly champion the rights of the disabled, the FSWF has maintained a remarkably low profile. But their SEBs and employment services are very famous in the social welfare community. They have even established “First Social Enterprises” to take specialized responsibility for management of their more commercially viable business operations. Disabled persons benefit from an integrated structure of employment guidance services, from pre-job training and job matching to on-the-job training.

Of these, the most productive is “First Cleaning Services.” They have won contracts through open, public bidding for more than 40 government organizations, including the Taipei City Government, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, and the Academia Sinica. The company has annual revenues of about NT$110 million per year and has created 318 job opportunities.

This business model is the product of an “iron triangle” composed of the management team, disabled people, and socio-economically disadvantaged groups. Specialists in social work are in charge of management, the disabled are the main source of workers for the cleaning teams, and members of disadvantaged groups (elderly people, abused women, ex-convicts trying to go straight) play a back-up role, helping out in handling situations that arise unexpectedly.

At the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Tai­pei, everything from the indoor exhibition space to the outdoor plaza comes within the scope of First Cleaning Services’ operations. A man named Ah ­Liang, age 45, is responsible for the wide porch that runs all the way around the building. He is very earnest about his work, and is happy to help others. You could never tell that he is severely mentally retarded.

“Our kids are not afraid of hard work,” says Fang Wei-ping, who is in charge at First Social Enterprises, “and they treasure just having the opportunity to work, something that has never been easy for them to get.” He adds that when children say to their parents “I work at the Academia Sinica,” the mothers and fathers who have endured so many years of tribulations can’t help but weep for joy, and inside everyone feels a tremendous sense of pride and gratification. In fact, pride is at the very core of First Cleaning—employee turnover is less than 20%, and the work is taken seriously and done with attention to detail, which is what keeps quality at the highest level.

The “Jianguo Strip” in Taipei City is the birthplace of businesses opened by charitable organizations, and operations there today include car washes, automobile accessories shops, gas stations, and an organic foods chain store, all offering “sheltered employment” to the differently abled.

At the FSWF, all the disabled people are affectionately called “kids,” regardless of age. For example, although Ah ­Liang is one year older than Fang Wei-ping, Fang still salutes him with a “Hey, Kid!” It is the achievements of these “children” that give the social workers a real sense of accomplishment.

“To train a mentally disabled person for a job that requires dealing directly with the customer is not easy,” explains Fang. “They have to pass through one barrier after another and gain a basic foundation of job skills, and they also have to undergo a complete physical and psychological evaluation to make sure they have enough resilience to cope with the pressures of the workplace.” After graduating from high school, these “children” are instructed in the most basic things first. Then, depending upon personal inclination, each individual can choose from among the bakery, the handicrafts factory, or the cleaning unit, where they get more in-depth job training. After being certified, they finally get the chance to enter the workplace.

First Cleaning Services was established in 2011, and enjoyed revenues of NT$35 million the first year. That figure doubled in 2012, and the total contracted for 2013 is an impressive NT$110 million. Aiming to help their businesses stay on track and operate sustainably, the board of directors has been studying the possibility of founding an independent social enterprise.

Fang says, “Everyone asks whether or not we are going to expand the business. But the starting point of a social enterprise is still to put the interests of the beneficiaries first, and you can’t just think about raking in huge profits. In principle, we are still going to stay focused on Tai­pei City and New Tai­pei City, the area served by the foundation, but we will study the feasibility of putting the baking and handicraft operations on an ‘enterprise’ footing.”

First Social Enterprises, a subsidiary of the First Social Welfare Foundation, has extended its antennae into food production, cleaning services, and scientific laboratory assistance, opening up many job opportunities for the handicapped.

“Dialogue in the Dark” was founded in 1988 by the German social entrepreneur Dr. Andreas Heinecke. It operates on a licensing model, and now has a presence in 160 cities in more than 30 countries around the globe. An incredible 6.5 million people have participated.

The Taiwan Foundation for the Blind (TFB) received licensing permission in April of 2011, after which they founded Dialogue in the Dark (DitD) TPE. This is the classic case study of a charitable organization importing a foreign social enterprise model. These two organizations share the same chairman—Dr. Ben ­Hsieh, who has been active in Taiwan’s social welfare community for many years.

The main goal of the TFB is to overturn the traditional bias in Chinese societies that the blind are only fit for one job, masseur or masseuse. DitD creates an entirely new job possibility for the blind—that of classroom trainer—by turning their “weakness” into a strength.

The course is set up in two spaces, a “dark room” and a “lit room.” The participants are led through the course by visually impaired persons. Working in complete blackness, the participants try their hands at wine tasting, music presentations, and other games, strengthening their personal characteristics, adaptability, communication skills, and leadership capabilities through radically new sensory experiences.

The DitD course is not cheap, running at about NT$5000 per person for a three-hour session. Even if a corporation does it in-house, the cost is still NT$15,000 for the whole day. The organizers also require participants to keep the course content a secret. It’s just like some films where they ask you not to reveal the ending, so as not to spoil it for people who haven’t seen it yet: by keeping the content a secret, the course providers ensure that those who try it in the future will have the same revelatory experience.

First Social Enterprises, a subsidiary of the First Social Welfare Foundation, has extended its antennae into food production, cleaning services, and scientific laboratory assistance, opening up many job opportunities for the handicapped.

At present DitD has seven full-time employees, 33 visually impaired instructors, and 17 volunteer teaching assistants. Instructor Yang Sheng­hong has devised a particularly incisive question for participants: “What does ‘darkness’ mean to you? Is it something to fear because you are facing the unknown? Or is it a place completely free of the pressures of being visible to others, where you can be yourself?”

Yang has welcomed hundreds of sighted friends into darkened rooms, and he says that every sighted person is hit with a wave of anxiety when they first step into the darkness. “At that moment, some people grab a colleague’s hand and hold on tight to get some sense of security, while others clear their throats and talk continuously to assure themselves that they haven’t disappeared in this space where they can’t even see their hands in front of their faces.”

A number of Taiwan’s largest corporations, including mobile phone giant HTC, Yahoo!Kimo, and UBS AG, have held DitD training sessions. The one that made the biggest impression on ­Hsieh was HTC’s international research and development team.

“The designers at HTC are elite professionals who come from all over the world. They are all very self-confident, and the company is always trying to figure out the best way to get so many geniuses to work together to create a huge genius greater than the sum of its parts,” Hsieh explains. Putting these people into the darkness, into a situation where relying on individual action can only lead to failure, turns out to be an excellent way to get them to realize the importance of teamwork, mutual trust, and passing on tasks to others.

Because people in Taiwan were mostly unfamiliar with the DitD concept, ­Hsieh allowed three years for the group to achieve break-even. The first year, they spent a lot of time and energy on publicity and free trials. The second year, they increased the number of fee-paying courses. And this year (their third), they are focusing on normalizing costs and revenues. In the first six months they held 74 courses, of which 43 were fee-paying, reaching break-even in recent months.

“Only if you face the dark do you understand what light is,” ­Hsieh advises, “and only by facing challenges can you turn the impossible into the possible.” Social enterprises are making it possible for charitable organizations to do an about-face: away from going to others to ask for charity, and toward having others come to them for valuable services. If management can be improved and efficiency maximized, there is no reason these organizations can’t become entirely self-sufficient!

First Social Enterprises, a subsidiary of the First Social Welfare Foundation, has extended its antennae into food production, cleaning services, and scientific laboratory assistance, opening up many job opportunities for the handicapped.