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Do You a Flavor - Serving Up Innovative Advocacy for the Disadvantaged
2018-02-08

Ader Wu (second from left), Chu Kuan-chen (right), and Zhang Shuhuai (not pictured) founded Do You a Flavor, a social enterprise aiding street people. (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)

Ader Wu (second from left), Chu Kuan-chen (right), and Zhang Shuhuai (not pictured) founded Do You a Flavor, a social enterprise aiding street people. (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)

New Year’s banquets are a normal part of the year-end scene around Taiwan, but they are usually thrown by corporations and government offices for their employees. Since 2015, a social enterprise named Do You a Flavor has brought a new twist to the custom: arranging a New Year’s feast for people living on the streets. Not much interested in conventional success, the young people behind Do You a Flavor are focused on breaking down stereo­types about street people, restarting dialogue between these disadvantaged individuals and mainstream society, and creating new possibilities for people living in poverty.
   

The next time you pass someone hawking goods on the street, take a moment to check out the good-quality Taiwanese products on offer, or even just to chat.
The next time you pass someone hawking goods on the street, take a moment to check out the good-quality Taiwanese products on offer, or even just to chat.

Although street people work just as hard as everyone else to get by, they are usually ignored by mainstream society. And, whether selling Yu­lan magnolia flowers by the roadside, hawking chewing gum from a wheelchair, or holding signs advertising apartments, these individuals also have in common their difficult sleeping arrangements, whether in ramshackle housing or on the streets themselves.

The young people behind the social enterprise Do You a Flavor have seen these individuals struggling to get by on the streets, and through conversations with them have learned they are much like everyone else, just held at arm’s length by society. Do You a Flavor therefore works to help the public better understand street people and create opportunities for them to change their straitened circumstances.

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.

 

Prejudice bars understanding

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.

 

Cooking up stone soup
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.


Cooking up stone soup

Since food is a great way to bring people together, Do You a Flavor created the Stone Soup project to invite street people to share a meal.

Do You a Flavor asked members of the public to provide food that was near its expiration date, gathered leftover meals from restaurants and unsold fruit from markets, and invited volunteers to cook it all up and distribute it on the streets. The team not only shared warming meals with street people, but also shared the motivation for the program with participating members of the public before the cooking began.

Setting aside the “street people” label, the diners were just folks feeling the satisfaction of a nice meal after a long day’s work. Meanwhile, the volunteers lost some of their preconceived notions about street people—by focusing on the similarities between the two groups, they discovered that those groups aren’t really that different.

On meeting actual street people, some program volunteers become dismayed at their inability to help meal recipients change their circumstances. But when discussing their experiences after participating, that initial sense of helplessness was transformed into taking action. One of Do You a Flavor’s aims is to remind people that even small steps can lead to big changes in society.

A change of scene

Life Market is another Do You a Flavor initiative, one that focuses on the people who sell chewing gum and Yu­lan magnolia blossoms in bustling downtown areas.

 

A change of scene

The Do You a Flavor partners noticed that when pedestrians spot people selling items such as chewinggum, cleaning rags, and blossoms on the street, they often either avoid them entirely, or reluctantly buy something. “It’s similar to begging, but isn’t begging,” says Wu.

Do You a Flavor is designing new products for these hawkers to sell in hopes of helping them break free of “sympathy sales,” encouraging the public to recognize selling on the street as a job, and creating new possibilities for the hawkers.

There’s an art to sizing and pricing products. “You catch the eye of busy people with small products that aren’t too weird and that are priced around NT$100,” explains Wu.

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 illustrators, and food products such as dried fruits and tealeaves produced in cooperation with small farmers, all of which enable the hawkers to also promote good products from Taiwan.

 

Pulling together

Pulling together

Putting creativity to work can do more than you’d think. Do You a Flavor holds occasional meetings of hawkers that it calls “boss summits” to affirm the street people’s status as, in effect, small business owners, and to acknowledge their commitment to supporting themselves and their families. The meetings enable vendors who rarely connect with their peers to share their experience, as well as tips on displaying products and observations on customers. They are also opportunities to receive a bit of moral support.

In addition to its monthly Stone Soup events and annual New Year’s banquets, Do You a Flavor has continued developing products and arranging talks that bring in young partners to work together on issues affecting disadvantaged people on the streets. Although they aren’t on the front lines in the way that social workers are, these young people are using the power of online communities to inform others about these issues in words and easily understood pictures. They also published a book, Street Survival Guide, in 2017. Do You a Flavor is hoping that its multipronged advocacy will draw more public attention to the disadvantaged.

The social enterprise is using a variety of programs to remove the labels so often attached to street people. If the public can gain a little more understanding and put forth a little more effort, the hard work of Do You a Flavor’s young people may ultimately succeed in transforming the travails of Taiwan’s street people into something much sweeter.