Lee Ya-Hui, professor of the department of the Adult and Continuing Education, has launched a program “Greening up this old house” to combine the strengths of the Yunlin County government, teachers and student of our department, lecturers of active aging about agri-food education and residents of local communities.

The core idea of the base is adult education, as well as agri-food industry. With the support of the county government, the old transit station of Taiwan Motor Transport at Dounan was transformed into the fist base for retirees in Taiwan.

The base shows the communities the roles and the application of adult education in an aging society. The concept of university social responsibility (USR) is shown in this project and in turn, industries in the communities can recognize their corporate social responsibility (CSR) when seeing teachers and students involving this project.

In recent years, the project has recruited and provided training for local agri-food partners by the lecturers to improve their skills. Our goals are to create more jobs in the local communities and therefore attract young people to come back to their hometown and in the end achieve sustainable development of the communities. 

There are three key points in the project conducted in 2021:

1. To see USR: Through activities, the youth have learned more on the sites and therefore they could have better understanding of meanings of USR and how it works.
2. USR see CSR: The students conducted interviews with the elderly in the communities and made documentaries with the materials.
3. From USR advances to SDGs Sustainability: We signed the MOU with the Yunlin government and co-created happy economy with the partners. The 6^th training section with farming teachers of Youth and Elderly Co-living Base was launched. The presentation of the 6^th training section was conducted with farming teachers of Youth and Elderly Co-living Base.

Students at Chung Cheng University participating in this project practiced USR in the communities and understood stories of local enterprises and their cultures. The owners of the enterprises also felt very touched when seeing the students join the project. Also, here are around 30 pieces of news reporting the activities.

In the future, we will arrange recruitment of partners of happy economy. This project is now conducted online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since conducting online events ist now a new trend in this society, we may consider holing both present activities and online events in the future.