Liu An-ting

30-second overview: Liu An-ting was born in 1989 in Taipei and grew up in Taichung¹. Her father Liu Yi-chung is the founder of the Lin Yeh-sheng Social Welfare Foundation; her mother Lin Yi-rong is a music teacher at the affiliated experimental elementary school of National Taichung University of Education and the chairperson of the Lin Yeh-sheng Charitable Foundation². In 2008 she graduated from Taichung Girls' Senior High School, having been simultaneously accepted by NTU's Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, NTU's Department of Political Science, and ten American universities; she ultimately chose Princeton University (full scholarship)¹. During her four university years she passed through a mud-brick schoolhouse in Ghana, a tent school in Haiti, a youth prison in America, a poor district in Paris, and a Cambodian genocide site³. At 23 she quit her New York management consulting job and returned to Taiwan; in 2013 she founded Teach For Taiwan (TFT), with NT$2,000 in capital, nine people, and eight schools in Tainan and Taitung⁴. In 2016 at the NCKU commencement ceremony she asked: "What do you do with your luck?" The line was shared hundreds of thousands of times and became a collective mantra for an entire generation⁵. But the line she says most often is: "Don't believe in me as an individual"⁶. After TFT completed its tenth anniversary in 2024, she passed the chairmanship to Lin Yen-hsi (former managing director of DDI Taiwan), stepping back to serve as a board director⁷. Over eleven years, TFT has cumulatively trained more than 400 program members, entered nine counties and cities and 85 schools, and accompanied more than 7,500 students⁸. But Liu An-ting's best work may not be TFT itself — it is that from the first day she was practicing how to leave.

Never Starting from Zero

To understand why Liu An-ting at 23 could do something most people at 63 would not dare, you have to first look at her family's living room.

The Liu family lived in Taichung. The ground floor was her father's office; the second floor belonged to her grandmother; the third floor was the space where the whole family actually "came home"². Her father Liu Yi-chung passed the National Taiwan University law school entrance exam after leaving the military². After graduating he founded the Lin Yeh-sheng Social Welfare Foundation, helping single-parent family children and disadvantaged youth in Taichung and Chiayi; within the foundation he established "Venture Path Academy" (創路學園), dedicated to guiding school dropouts back to education². Her mother Lin Yi-rong graduated from the National Taipei University of Education (Class of '72), currently teaches music at the experimental elementary school affiliated with National Taichung University of Education, and serves as chairperson of the Lin Yeh-sheng Charitable Foundation².

This family background reshaped Liu An-ting's story. She is not "a gifted girl spontaneously inspired." She grew up watching her parents do social welfare work for the disadvantaged, and was already tutoring dropout children at her father's foundation while in junior high school². Her father Liu Yi-chung once said in an interview: "My own schooling was a cramming-style education, so I never interfere with my children's approach to learning, never teach them studying techniques — I let them explore their own interests themselves."² This hands-off parenting was the backdrop for all of Liu An-ting's choices later. She was not pushed into doing good — she was permitted to observe a family that did good, and then made her own decisions about what to do.

This detail matters because mainstream media later framed Liu An-ting as "a Princeton honor student's sacrifice and dedication." This framing turns her motivation into a personal virtue. But she herself has always known the truth is more generational: she was simply inheriting what her parents had already done for more than two decades, at a larger scale and broader scope.

Four Years at Princeton: Walking Out of the Transcript

In 2008, Liu An-ting graduated from Taichung Girls' Senior High School, having simultaneously been admitted through early decision to NTU's Department of Foreign Languages, NTU's Department of Political Science, and through self-studied English to ten American universities. She ultimately chose Princeton University, because it was the only one offering her a full scholarship¹.

She entered Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs (later renamed from the Woodrow Wilson School), majoring in international development with a focus on education policy³. Her senior thesis on the reconstruction of Cambodian civil society won the school's thesis prize.

But Princeton's greatest gift to her was not a thesis prize or a transcript — it was the time "off campus" across those four years. She later recalled this in multiple interviews³:

Her first summer, she went to Ghana in West Africa, teaching at a small school built from mud brick. The children there had no paper or pens. Her second summer she went to Haiti, volunteering at a tent school; Haiti had just experienced the 2010 earthquake. An American youth prison, where she served as a volunteer teacher for two years, facing youth offenders aged 18 to 20. She was full of teaching enthusiasm, but her students had absolutely no interest in learning — in their eyes, studying was "something for life's winners." She did not give up, taught each class earnestly, and their attitudes slowly shifted³. She also visited a poor district in Paris and a Cambodian genocide site.

These experiences took her around the globe, showing her the situations of disadvantaged children worldwide. And then she asked herself a question: What about Taiwan?

This question was not rhetorical. She returned to Taiwan and researched the situation, discovering that even in wealthy Taiwan, there were still high proportions of disadvantaged children in certain regions with severely lagging educational attainment, yet even stable, quality teachers were hard to find⁴. This reality became the starting point for her later founding of TFT.

In 2014 she published her first book, Learning to Be Strong: I Got Into Princeton, and later Leaving Home to Go Home: A Princeton Journey⁹. Both books deal with the same thing: what a Taiwanese kid learns at a top American university is not "how to become a more excellent elite" — it is "how to become someone willing to come home."

2013: NT$2,000, Nine People, Eight Schools

After graduating from Princeton, Liu An-ting first worked at a management consulting firm in New York¹. This path looked reasonable at the time: top university graduate, first job at a New York consulting firm, a few years later perhaps investment banking, an MBA, or an international organization.

She quit in less than a year and returned to Taiwan¹.

In 2013, at a social enterprise camp organized by Stanley Yen's Commonweal Alliance Foundation in Taiwan, she met Stanley Yen, Fang Hsin-chou, and Li Ji-jen. Stanley Yen was the founder of the Commonweal Alliance, president of Asia World Hotel, and a longtime advocate for Indigenous education; Fang Hsin-chou was a technology industry veteran who would later found the Junyi Academy Foundation; Li Ji-jen was then a professor at NTU's College of Management⁴. They were discussing the "talent problem" in rural education — not an absence of educational resources, but an absence of good teachers willing to stay.

After the camp ended, Liu An-ting spent six months conducting feasibility research. She traveled through rural areas, interviewed principals and teachers, and researched international cases⁴. The model she referenced was Teach For America: a program founded in 1989 by Princeton alumna Wendy Kopp, using top-university graduates to fill teacher gaps in America's impoverished school districts⁴.

In 2013, TFT was formally established. Capital: NT$2,000⁴.

A first cohort of nine people entered eight schools in Tainan and Taitung as full-time teachers for two years⁴.

The scale was so small that almost no one noticed. But over the next eleven years, it would draw a new line across the map of Taiwan's rural education.

"What Do You Do With Your Luck?"

In June 2016, TFT had been operating for three years and the first cohort of teachers were nearing the end of their two-year service. Liu An-ting was invited to deliver the commencement address at National Cheng Kung University⁵.

She was 27 years old. She did not talk about dreams or the future. She asked a question: "What do you do with your luck?"⁵

She shared two stories⁵. The first was her first time teaching at an American youth prison during college. The young people there were between eighteen and twenty years old. The second story was a child named A-wei she had seen in a TFT classroom: his father ran a bubble tea shop, his mother had emigrated from Vietnam to marry, the family could not pay school fees, and A-wei was skipping school to help sell drinks. After a TFT teacher found him and brought him back, he scored highest among the boys in the class and won an award at a national drawing competition for rural students⁴.

Between the two stories she posed that question. "Luck" in her mouth was not rhetoric. She was saying: the fact that you can sit here listening to a speech is itself an unfair result. What are you going to do about that unfairness?

At the end of the speech, she hoped the graduates would be able to say four years later, with pride and joy, that they had "taken their luck and chosen kindness, chosen gentleness, chosen to care, chosen to love"⁵.

These words were shared hundreds of thousands of times online⁵. They became a collective mantra for a generation of Taiwanese university students. Many people who later joined TFT said their first encounter with Liu An-ting's name was in a clip of this speech. The scale of the sharing transformed her from a young social entrepreneur into a media focal point.

But this exposure also brought a narrative frame she did not want.

"Don't Believe in Me as an Individual"

Liu An-ting's 2013 TEDxTaipei talk transformed her overnight from an unknown figure into a media focal point⁶. The mainstream media label given to her: "Princeton honor student gives up high salary to return to Taiwan and teach disadvantaged rural children." The story became an inspirational narrative of personal sacrifice, not a structural problem of educational system failure.

She later said directly in a Cheers magazine interview: "Don't believe in me as an individual... What has influence is not me as an individual, but the belief that I hold."⁶

This line was taken in the Taiwan social enterprise world at the time as a "modest remark from a young entrepreneur." But Liu An-ting was not making a modest remark. Her entire subsequent decade was a literal enactment of this line.

In another Cheers interview she explained why she held this position so firmly: "The media framed TFT as a 'hero story,' not a systemic movement."⁶ Her concern was: if TFT's success is attributed to "a special individual," that story becomes an unreplicable exception. Others would hear it and think: "Wow, she's great." And then do nothing. But if TFT's success is attributed to "a special belief," that story becomes a starting point any person can use to take action.

This distinction mattered deeply to her. Because she always knew one thing: she would leave one day, and TFT had to be able to exist after she left.

The "Transforming Education Power Couple"

Liu An-ting's personal life is relatively low-key, but one thing is openly known in Taiwan's education community: her husband is Lu Guan-wei¹⁰.

Lu Guan-wei graduated from NTU Medical School in 2013, left medicine for education, joined the Junyi Academy Foundation and recorded the first mathematics videos, and later became president and CEO of Junyi Academy¹¹. By 2024 Junyi Academy had accumulated more than 5.28 million users with 270,000 active monthly learners, making it Taiwan's largest non-profit online learning system¹¹.

The year Liu An-ting founded TFT — 2013 — was the same year Lu Guan-wei pivoted from physician to education. This was not coincidence; they later became the "transforming education power couple"¹⁰. One sends top university graduates into rural school classrooms as teachers; the other sends digital learning resources into those same schools for children to learn on their own. The two trajectories are not a replacement relationship — they are complementary: TFT solves the upstream problem of "good teachers not staying," while Junyi addresses the downstream problem of "unequal resources."

The meaning of this couple is not gossip. It is a structural phenomenon: around 2013, a cohort of young Taiwanese simultaneously made similar decisions — leaving seemingly guaranteed career paths to enter the educational field. Liu An-ting and Lu Guan-wei are the two most visible of these people, but they are not isolated. The Junyi Academy Foundation, Junyi, TFT, DFC Taiwan, Junyi Experimental Education, KIST (public school operated by private management), and others — all are part of the same wave from this generation¹².

2024: The Founder Steps Down

In 2024, TFT completed the election of its third board of directors⁷.

Lin Yen-hsi assumed the chairmanship of TFT starting in 2024. She is a former managing director and global board advisor of DDI International Consulting (Taiwan), who began her consulting career at Caliper in 2000, joined DDI in 2006, specializing in organizational leadership and talent assessment, with more than 20 years of practical experience advising listed companies⁷.

More significant is the timeline of this story: Lin Yen-hsi was introduced to TFT and Liu An-ting through NTU Professor Li Ji-jen in 2015 — nine years before formally taking the chairmanship⁷.

Liu An-ting stepped back to serve as a board director⁷.

This move is uncommon in Taiwan's NGO world. Most social entrepreneurs, after founding an organization, remain in the chairmanship until the organization ceases to exist — not because they are clinging to power, but because the organization itself often becomes overly dependent on the founder's personal charisma, leaving no one able to take over.

Liu An-ting's stepping down was a proactive act. She was not pushed out, did not step down because she could no longer continue — she stepped down because she believes that an organization unable to operate independently of its founder is not a sustainable organization. She has repeated this point in multiple interviews: "TFT is a social movement, not my personal project."⁶

What does this stepping down concretely mean? It means:

• Lin Yen-hsi is now responsible for TFT's 2030 strategic blueprint, which carries three major visions: "Making educational inequality a social movement in which the majority participate," "Making learning poverty history," and "Making non-conventional careers an equal option"¹³
• Liu An-ting as a board director continues to provide strategic counsel, but is no longer at the core of the organization's daily decision-making
• TFT has formally transitioned from a "founder + team" model to a "professional governance + founder-as-advisor" model
• Lin Yen-hsi brings expertise in corporate leadership training and talent assessment — a complement to TFT's previous emphasis on educational field work

Liu An-ting said something in a Flipedu interview that can be read in the context of this stepping down: "The TFT chairperson must first be an adult who can accept failure and incompleteness."¹⁴ This line is not only advice to her successor — it is her summary of eleven years of work. A founder who can accept incompleteness is the only kind who can actually walk away from their own position.

Not an Ending, but the Next Starting Point

Is the 24-year-old woman in 2014's Learning to Be Strong the same person as the 35-year-old who stepped down from the TFT chairmanship in 2024?

On the surface they seem vastly different. At 24 she had just returned from New York, full of passion and idealism; at 35 she had eleven years of movement experience, a network of 400+ alumni, an organization through three board elections, a public quote cited so often it has become a cliché. But look carefully at each of her choices and you see that everything she did across those eleven years was the same one thing: making this unnecessary to need her.

From the first day of founding TFT she was practicing how to leave. She refused to be framed by the media as a hero, refused to become TFT's sole spokesperson, refused to bind her own resume to TFT's success. She was always training other people to do her work, say her words, bear her responsibilities⁶¹⁴.

This is not something easily done. Most founders do not want to let go as much as they cannot: their organizations are too centered on them, their identities too deeply entangled with their organizations. Liu An-ting was able to do it because from the first day she was designing an organization that "could run without her."

This is also why her "don't believe in me as an individual" is said sincerely. She asked readers and media not to focus on her personally, because she knew that if everyone believed in her personally, she could never leave. The cost of not being able to leave is that TFT would forever remain an organization at the scale of its founder — would never become a true social movement.

On the day she stepped down in 2024, it was the most important act of those eleven years — and also the least visible. Because a good leaving is quiet.

Liu An-ting has not disappeared. After becoming a board director she remains part of TFT's strategy, remains a public advocate for rural education issues, remains Lu Guan-wei's wife, remains the occasional former founder invited to give university talks. But she is no longer TFT's center. The center now is Lin Yen-hsi, the 400+ alumni, the institutional momentum TFT has already built, and the culture she left behind — "don't believe in me as an individual."

If someday TFT dissolves, transforms, or merges with other organizations, no one will say it was "Liu An-ting's failure." Because from the beginning she never built this organization as an extension of her personal self. This is the rarest — and most valuable — choice she made as a founder.

In 2016, when she asked "what do you do with your luck?" at NCKU, she did not yet fully know the answer herself. Ten years later she answered that question with the act of stepping down: take your luck, do the work, then let the work outlive you.

This is the story of the education activist of this generation in Taiwan most worth remembering. But she would object to you calling her that.

Further Reading

• Teach for Taiwan (TFT) — TFT's complete organizational history, including the 3A framework, two-year program design, six-week training, 400+ alumni network, and Pingtung Educational Innovation Base. This article focuses on Liu An-ting as an individual; for TFT as an organization, see that article.
• Rural Education in Taiwan (台灣偏鄉教育) — The primary arena of Liu An-ting's eleven years of work. TFT's concentric-circle framework (child/school/community/society) was collectively built by TFT, but Liu An-ting was one of the key early advocates.
• Lu Guan-wei — Liu An-ting's husband, chairman and CEO of Junyi Academy. The other half of the "transforming education power couple"; in 2013 both simultaneously pivoted from their respective elite tracks into the fight against educational inequality.
• Stanley Yen — Founder of the Commonweal Alliance Foundation and one of the key connections at TFT's founding. In 2013, Liu An-ting met Fang Hsin-chou and Li Ji-jen at a social enterprise camp organized by Stanley Yen — that camp was TFT's incubation space.
• Learning Poverty (學習貧窮) — TFT listed "making learning poverty history" as one of its three 2030 ten-year vision goals. This is the strategic north star Liu An-ting left for the next generation of TFT leaders before stepping down.
• Taiwan's Indigenous Education and Language Revitalization (台灣原住民族教育與語言復振的交界) — TFT's work at the Pingtung Educational Innovation Base and in schools serving Indigenous communities is an intersection with this issue. The 2030 strategic blueprint Liu An-ting wrote before stepping down as chairperson identifies this as a priority area.
• Remote School District Education Development Act (偏遠地區學校教育發展條例全解) — Article 16 of the Act's "five-party cooperation" authorizes NGOs to enter rural schools; TFT was the earliest and largest case. 2017 Act + 2014 Liu An-ting = a timeline of public-private collaboration.
• Becoming a Teacher: Taiwan's Teacher Training System (一個教師的誕生：台灣師資培育制度) — TFT's six-week training is frequently compared to the four-year university teacher training system. Liu An-ting's position has never been "TFT replaces teacher training" — it is "TFT fills the rural-placement gap that teacher training cannot."

References