by Jason Sheng-Fen Cheng Assistant Professor Department of Adult and Continuing Education

1. Scandinavian Universal Care System Applied in Taiwan: An Analysis of the Peng Wan-Ru Foundation Model by Jason Sheng-Fen Cheng Assistant Professor Department of Adult and Continuing Education National Taiwan Normal University

2. Thinking along the line of “women helping (disadvantaged)women,” the team at the Foundation has striven to advance women’s right to work with the aim to raise the level of women’s economic autonomy and to eventually achieve gender equality. Why P.W.R. Foundation began to introduce the concept of Scandinavian universal care in Taiwan?

3. The P.W.R. Foundation’s home service system created 4,719 job opportunities for disadvantaged second-career women (mainly middle to old aged) in 2009, with salaries totaling about US$30 million(NT$900,000,000)

4. II. The Evolution of the W.R. Model • Direction 1: The Personal Safety(focused on women safety, from community to school) Community related projects A. The Community Safety Project In the May of 1997, in order to deal with dead corners of public safety, the residents adopted the democratic corporatist model in which they invited public officials to co-organize “community safety meetings” to study ways of getting rid of the safety dead corners and to follow up the results regularly. This model enabled the residents to participate in the policy-making process and gave women rights to express their views and be concerned with community environments and with the safety of others. In so doing, both personal safety and gender equality were enhanced.

5. B. The Community Child and Youth Advisees Adoption System In the December of 1997, after the community safety project was launched, many community residents discovered that the unruliness of the youngsters was the biggest factor causing the security problems in the communities. Hence the Foundation began to train suitable volunteers and parents to offer assistance to do with communication and readjustment, among other things, to children who had encountered difficulties in their lives. It pooled together public and private resources to build a support system to respond to the various needs of children within the community.

6. School related projects • The Nationwide Community Safety Promotion Alliance In 1998, it collaborated with the “Association of Convenient Stores of the Republic of China” to form an alliance to promote community safety and set up safety stations at the convenient stores, offering employment counseling, information relating to community care services and community crime prevention, etc.

7. B. The School District Safety Alliance P.W.R. Foundation shifted its effort away from frontline work in order to focus on experience-sharing and assisting communities to duplicate its model, making sure that each community could function independently. It also encouraged the communities to build connections and cooperate with one another. • It combined the strengths of the school districts of two middle schools and six elementary schools and linked the schools with police stations, civic administrators’ offices and community organizations to form a system of support.

8. Direction2: work integration (focused on women economic independent, from Child to Senior) A.Public Child Care In 1998 the P.W.R. Foundation began to develop the “Community Childminders’ Support System,” and for several years since, had allied with other NGOs to advocate a state childminder care policy. “Childminder Care Management and Fee Subsidy” policy was implemented nationwide in 2008. In 2005, with the opening of Wu-Jia Community Self-Governing Daycare Center located in the city of Feng-Shan, Kao-Hsiung County, the P.W.R. Foundation’s public daycare pilot project was launched. Again, this daycare center was run as a nonprofit organization founded with the concept of community self-governing and public participation.

9. B. Public Elderly Care 1.housekeeping service to expand rapidly; in 2000 the Foundation through experiments found a very efficient model for training women who were seeking to rejoin the labor market and for running and managing the service. 2. in 2006 it began to develop the “home help” project, which combined “housekeeping service” with “elderly care,” looking after older people who were slightly disabled and still somewhat capable of managing their daily lives.

10. III. Analysis of the W. R. Model’s Operation 1. The W.R. model has followed a different mode of thinking, believing that to build a system of “women helping women,” women’s financial needs must be satisfied. Consequently, the W.R. model has not used the low salary strategy; instead it emphasizes “fair salaries,” which means that its salaries are comparable to the standard of the mainstream market’s salary structure. This is due to the P.W.R. Foundation’s belief that economic autonomy is the starting point of gender equality.

11. 2. Foundation mediates between the users and the service workers; in its home service projects, after the initial introduction, the users pay the service workers directly. As for the Foundation, the “mutual support donations” model has been used, in which the users “donate” a set amount regularly to the Foundation. Therefore, in the W.R. model, the Foundation does not play the role of the employer or agent, and is not in charge of the service workers’ salaries. Its main source of funding comes from donations.

12. However, donation is not an obligation; how can the Foundation achieve its stable financial support, with which to develop subsequent projects? The answer lies in the fact that by maintaining stable service quality and reasonable management regulations, the W.R. model has established a set of operation formulas based on mutual trust, requiring the users while using the services to enter the mutual support system and abide by its rights and obligation rules. This kind of non-legally-binding psychological contract means an unwritten understanding of goals, expectations and procedures. The W.R. model’s mutual trust system built on the foundation of psychological contract has been able to rely on social trust and identification for the continuation of its operation.

13. 3.the W.R. model has been able to attend to both the mission conception and project implementation. By disseminating concepts from top-down and accepting arguments and discussions from the execution level bottom-up, and using reflections and communications generated from the method of testing and collaborative decision-making, the Foundation has been able to closely link its missions with its project implementation.

14. 4.It is mainly due to the fact that the Foundation has maintained a high sensitivity to the changes in the market and kept its growth under strict control. it has controlled its growth and has been cautious to balance the market demands with the number of its trainees.

15. Conclusion The P.W.R. Foundation has used the Scandinavian form of democratic participation to raise the level of trust among the organization’s members, built mutual support networks and established supportive regulation mechanisms. It has been recognized by the public as a successful model.

16. Next Step? • The P.W.R. Foundation has been aware of its own limitation and of the fact that to really fulfill the goal of gender equality, policy intervention is inevitable. Hence, the W.R. model has engaged in project experiment and policy promotion. With consideration of government’s financial capacity, it has applied revisionism so as to preclude high taxation. For instance, for the sake of raising childminder service quality, the Foundation advocated the childminder care management policy, but the government was made responsible for only part of the childcare fees. This policy has not only raised the quality of childminders, but also reduced the financial burdens for working families; it allows Scandinavian universal care to take its first stride in Taiwan. In the future, the Foundation will carry on its research and development of childcare and elderly care projects and continue to promote universal care policies.