Friendly and Accessible Environment

The Sunmake Culture and Arts Foundation was commissioned by the National Center for Traditional Arts to manage the Yilan Park and is committed to promoting cultural equity. Starting in 2018, the foundation has been accepting applications to visit the park free of charge from registered NGOs that serve the elderly, the disabled, the underprivileged, and residents in remote regions. In launching this initiative, the foundation hopes to make culture more accessible and facilitate understanding of traditional performing arts, folk arts, and crafts.

The foundation is also working with the Tourism Bureau and the social enterprise OurCityLove to organize mini-trips to Yilan. As part of this project, a group of visually impaired young people from Hong Kong visited the NCFTA Park in Yilan, where they enjoyed a stage performance via audio description and learned about traditional Taiwanese glove puppetry by touching specially designed tactile puppets. The third initiative, a collaboration with Happy Mount and CareBoth Charity Marketing Platform, was a six-day co-learning program that brought together a total of 20 students from Happy Mount (a non-profit facility taking care of disabled people) and the Taipei Mandarin Experimental Elementary School. The program gave schoolchildren and disabled co-participants the opportunity to spend time together, thus fostering understanding. The Sunmake Culture and Arts Foundation also introduced elements of its Artisan Workshop Project into the co-learning program. In addition to learning about the importance of respecting differences and promoting cultural equity, by working on craft together, participants also showcased their creativity.