Prejudice bars understanding
When Chu Kuan-chen, Ader Wu and Zhang Shuhuai took part in the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement sit-ins, they witnessed street people being prevented from accessing the food and drinks that were laid on for participants. There were plenty of resources on hand, but the public’s prejudices about street people, including the belief that they are lazy, grasping drunkards, left some students unwilling to share with these people in need. The experience prompted Chu and the others to question how accurate such characterizations actually were.
How did they end up on the streets? Were they really born lazy? What is life on the streets like? Moved by the desire to answer such questions and gain a better understanding of street people’s thinking, the future founders of Do You a Flavor began using their after-work hours to organize events and build up networks. Their efforts included encouraging people to give their recyclables to senior citizens, establishing the “Life Market” program to help street people develop and sell small environmentally friendly products, and starting the “Stone Soup” project, which involves sharing meals with street people. With their projects growing larger, they pooled their resources and established Do You a Flavor as a social enterprise in 2015.
As the three young people delved deeper into the reality of life on the streets, they found that 80% of street people work part time at jobs such as carrying signboards and distributing flyers. But because there’s little money in the work, certainly not enough to rent an apartment in the city, they are compelled to live on the streets.
“Street people are desperate to leave the streets,” says Wu, rejecting the conventional wisdom that they are on the street because they don’t want to work. Wu explains that the general public’s understanding of homelessness gets cause and effect backwards, and that in fact most homeless people live on the streets because something has ruptured their connection to mainstream society, leaving them without goals to work towards, and because society generally deals with the homeless by avoiding, ignoring, or rejecting them. He argues that lifting these individuals out of poverty requires clearing up the public’s misconceptions.
Several of Do You a Flavor’s new products have proved popular with consumers. These include Yulan magnolia blossom air fresheners, red envelopes developed in conjunction with Cherng and Turtledrawturtle, both well-known Taiwanese illustrator.