Helping the dropout students to learn a skill set that they can live off when they’re older, and this helps the local community, by bringing that new life back into a community of aging population, it helps keep the middle school dropouts off the streets, something good that’s, happened here, from the Newspapers, translated…
An old hospital, that’s, vacant and unused for many years, after a group of youths who’d returned back home from getting their educations and working in the cities, it is about to, gain a new lease on life, being turned into, a school of life for the adolescents who are from the lower end of the socioeconomic statuses, to continue the wills of this old hospital, in “saving more lives”, and adding a new breath to the lives of the local teens.
In order to resolve the high dropout rates of adolescents in Sanxia District, along with the difficulties in providing education to youths from lower end of the socioeconomic statuses, the social enterprise, “Happiness & Joy Cultural Foundation” had rented the seventy year-old old hospital by the tourist attraction streets of Sanxia, “Love Thy Neighbors Hospital”, and changed the functionality of the hospital, turned it into “the Grassroot Work Training School”, to provide the middle school dropouts and adolescents who are from less well-to-do backgrounds in the Sanxia District to allow them to have a set of life skills they can live off of, the grand opening of the learning academy is later on this week.
and here’s a video from Youtube, describing what the foundation does to help the children…in Chinese!
Based off of the statistics of the Department of Health & Social Sanitations, the are a reported of almost 30,000 high-risk families, and, there were, as many as 43,000 children who are at risk. There are almost 19,219 adolescents from twelve to eighteen in this group. And, there are, nearly, 3,500 children and adolescents who are placed in the systems per year here, because their families can’t serve the functions they needed them to.
In 2006, Jun-Cheng Lin returned back home and set up the very first arts platform in Sanxia with the beliefs of “Cultural Innovations, Arts, Community, and Philanthropy” as the platform’s core beliefs, it was the very FIRST arts and performance platform in Sanxia. As he’d returned back to his hometown, he’d found, that a lot of children are dealing with poverty in the homes, single-parenthood, cross-generation families, drugs, along with crimes, and other challenges in their lives. These children didn’t have the company of parents from when they were growing up, and that’s caused them to lag behind in learning; in middle school, a lot of these children dropped out, and left the forums of learning at an early age.
“Since we’re now, back home, let’s, accompany the children back home ourselves”, Lin decided to start up the education plan to accompany the children without the stable social support systems. In order to help this group of adolescents to find the direction in their lives, who’d been abandoned by their own families, as well as the school systems, the Happiness & Joy Cultural Foundation took a little over a year to get the funding it needed, to get the energies from the local enterprises, and transformed the seventy-year-old, very first surgical hospital “Love Thy Neighbor Hospital”, and made the place into the very first school that accompanied the adolescents to help them find the directions in their own lives-the Grassroot Occupation Training Academy”.
The academy had started working with the local middle school in January, and hoped, that in the future, with the setting up with the internship shop, afterschool help sessions, the arts skills courses, to help the children gain a life skill so they can use that as they get older. The employee from the foundation, Kuo pointed out, that other than helping the adolescents gain a life skill, more importantly, the program connects the local resources of the community, and slowly, helped each life grow up, to allow the students to use their own paces, to grow, and to make the discoveries in their lives.
And so, this, is an amazing program, that offers a skill training course, for those students who don’t do well in the academia, and, the founder has the goal of helping these adolescents to use their own abilities, to turn their own lives around, so they are no longer, in the vicious cycles of poverty.
Life, the Obstacle Course 