This project aims to solve the complex challenges faced by mountain villages in the catchment area of Jade Reservoir in New Taipei City, including health education, the development of local tea industries, ecological conservation, and disaster prevention in upstream communities. Centered on the Shiding and Pinglin districts, the project focuses on four major topics: "health of aging farmers", "rural education", "climate risk", and "industrial transformation". It aims to foster sustainable communities that are healthy, resilient, and inclusive.
This project identifies key challenges in the target areas through five dimensions: people, culture, land, industry, and landscape,
- People: The outmigration of the younger population has left the majority of agricultural workers aged 65 and above, raising concerns over both the physical and mental health of elderly farmers, as well as their occupational safety.
- Culture: Local communities encounter a crisis of industrial and cultural heritage transmission and the unmet needs of rural education reform and lifelong learning. Cultural memory is gradually disappearing with the migration of the population and the withering of the elderly.
- Land: Increasing frequency of extreme weather events heightens the risk of slope disasters and crop loss. The mountainous terrain faces dual threats of excessive rainfall and groundwater depletion during droughts.
- Industry: Due to land use restrictions, it is necessary to promote industrial transformation and green marketing in catchment areas under water quality protection and endangered species conservation to achieve ecological conservation and industrial sustainability.
- Landscape: Insufficient social infrastructure and a lack of well-designed public spaces affect the quality of life and weaken community cohesion, limiting access to education, healthcare, and social interaction.
To address these issues, the project collaborates closely with local communities to enhance their resilience. The five dimensions are synthesized into four key areas of resilience—health, education, industry, and environment—each with corresponding solutions. The overarching goal is to strengthen mountain village resilience and foster long-term sustainable development in ecology, local livelihoods, and community industries.
At different stages of project implementation, the team takes on evolving roles, each with distinct priorities and strategies:
- In the initial phase, the team acts as an executor, working with partner communities to identify local issues through curriculum design and field engagement. By combining empathy with professional expertise, the team and community collaboratively build diverse forms of resilience.
- Concurrently, the team serves as an observer, using both quantitative and qualitative indicators to document the diverse ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) values co-created with the community throughout the resilience-building process.
- In the following phase, the team becomes a facilitator, leveraging the identified ESG values as a platform to connect communities with enterprises. This partnership encourages companies to invest resources into local development and enhance community resilience. In turn, the ESG value generated benefits the companies’ sustainability performance.
- Ultimately, the team assumes the role of a nurturer, drawing from previous phases to better understand the personal and professional needs of students and faculty. This supports long-term talent cultivation for both communities and enterprises, fostering a resilient, healthy, and sustainable partnership among National Chengchi University (NCCU), local communities, and the private sector.
The framework encompasses the project's core strategies and objectives to enhance the resilience and sustainable development capacity of mountain villages in the Jade Reservoir area through collaboration between National Chengchi University, enterprises, and stakeholders in communities.
1. The expected overall outcomes of this project include:
(1) Enhancing community resilience by addressing challenges across five key dimensions—people, culture, land, industry, and landscape.
(2) Fostering long-term and sustainable development of community resilience through facilitating collaboration between communities and enterprises.
(3) Enabling NCCU faculty and students to gain practical experience and professional knowledge, while deepening their understanding of how to engage with and contribute to local communities.
2. Establish quantitative performance indicators and qualitative benefits from three aspects: "curriculum design and field engagement", "enterprise participation and resource investment", and "community resilience improvement".
In the short term, the project will track the number of activities held, participant counts, sample area interviews, and workshops conducted. Project effectiveness will be evaluated through questionnaires and in-depth interviews.
In the medium and long term, evaluation components, including curriculum design and field participation, corporate participation and resource investment, community resilience improvement, and cooperative micro-curriculum mechanism in primary and secondary schools will be used to establish methods for estimating Social Return on Investment (SROI) and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), aiming to comprehensively assess the project's performance and impact across various dimensions.
