Community practice at a crossroad: the approaches and challenges in Taiwan

Abstract

Community practice broadly refers to work that ‘involves empowerment through organized groups of people acting collectively to control decisions, projects, programs, and policies that affect them as a community’ (Rubin and Rubin, 2007). Rothman (1987, 2008) categorized community practice into three models: social planning, locality development, and social action. In practice, these models have become blended whilst the boundaries amongst market, state, and civil society fade and the culture of civic participation rapidly changes (Weil and Gamble, 2005; Boehm and Cnaan, 2012). Cross-cutting forms of community-based action have been emerging in United States (US) and the world (Sites, Chaskin and Parks, 2007). Similarly, community practice in Taiwan presents a mix of these models. Taiwan's early social policies including community development were made for supporting economic development. From 1980s to 1990s, the social welfare system of Taiwan was characterized as ‘low/medium social security expenditure, high social investment, more extensive gender discrimination in salary, medium/high welfare satisfaction, a high non-coverage rate for pensions, high individual welfare loading, and high family welfare responsibility’ relative to other welfare systems in the world (Lee and Ku, 2007). In recent decades, Taiwan has emerged as a developed country. The social security system has gradually become quite complex with the National Health Insurance system initiated in 1994, National Pension Act announced in 2007, and Long-Term Care Services Act enacted in 2015. These social insurances’ costs are now shared by individuals, employers, and government. Social services such as public assistance for poverty relief, preventive intervention for domestic violence and child abuse, and developmental services for adolescence and youth are primarily funded by tax money and provided through partnerships across government offices and non-profit organizations. Meanwhile, the dimension of community now reflects a field for deepening people's participation in shaping local identity, promoting well-being, and serving needs locally.