Tzu Chi: From Five Cents in Hualien to Global Disaster Sites

30-Second Overview: In 1966, Master Cheng Yen founded the Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation for Relief and Benevolence in Hualien, with initial funding coming from five cents saved daily by housewives. ¹ This organization, which began with poverty alleviation, later expanded its services to hospitals, schools, international disaster relief, and environmental protection; research on the 2024 Hualien earthquake reveals how it transforms its routine volunteer network into disaster response capacity. ^{2 3}

Perhaps the most counterintuitive aspect of Tzu Chi is not how large it became, but how it turned "doing a little every day" into an organizational method that can be replicated across cities and nations.

_Photo: William Cho / Wikimedia Commons File Page, CC BY-SA 2.0._

In 1966, in Hualien, Master Cheng Yen and 30 housewives established the Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation for Relief and Benevolence through daily donations of five cents saved in bamboo tubes. ¹ Six years later, witnessing how disease and poverty were entangled within the same families, Tzu Chi began to extend poverty alleviation into healthcare. ⁴ In 1983, the foundation broke ground for the Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital, which opened in 1987; following the 2024 Hualien earthquake, academic research placed Tzu Chi within the context of "public-private collaboration" and "evacuation shelters." ^{5 3}

This timeline might look like a story of an institution expanding year by year, but what truly warrants inquiry is: how did a five-cent coin become a system capable of operating on disaster sites? The answer lies not only in donation figures, but in how Tzu Chi deconstructed faith into visits, documentation, training, division of labor, and repetitive action.

Five Cents in the Vegetable Basket

Master Cheng Yen’s lay name was Wang Chin-yun, born in 1935 in Qingshui, Taichung. After her adoptive father passed away, she began to engage with Buddhism, later practicing at Puming Temple in Xiulin, Hualien, and becoming a disciple of Venerable Yinshun. This life turning point made "ordaining" not just a personal spiritual practice, but gradually connected to a question: how can Buddhism care for specific people in society? ¹

Data compiled by the National Museum of Taiwan History notes that Catholic nuns at Hualien Hsing High School once asked her: Do churches, hospitals, and nursing homes have similar arrangements for serving society? Did Buddhism have them? This question did not immediately form a large-scale project; instead, it first landed in the vegetable baskets and change pockets of housewives. ¹

Saving five cents before buying vegetables, totaling 15 yuan per month, became emergency relief funds a year later. The power of the phrase "five cents can also save lives" lies in rewriting charity from the generosity of a few into an action that many can participate in daily. ¹

📝 Curator’s Note: Tzu Chi’s first important object was not a grand building, but change placed in daily life, to be deposited into every day.

Tzu Chi’s global official history page also describes early fundraising as "Years in Bamboo Tubes": 30 housewives saved 50 cents before buying vegetables each day, while six nuns made and sold surplus baby shoes. This is the organization’s own historical narrative, with details carrying clear symbolism; yet it still points to an observable organizational design: turning goodwill into fixed frequency, and fixed frequency into predictable resources. ²

From Visit Rolls to a Hospital That Does Not Require Security Deposits

Early Tzu Chi work did not end with delivering supplies to doorsteps. Master Cheng Yen visited poor households, established records, continued to offer comfort, and attempted to help recipients regain self-reliance. This visitation system meant that "poverty" was no longer just a label needing relief, but a life state to be understood, tracked, and accompanied. ¹

After six years of contact with Taiwan’s impoverished families, Master Cheng Yen shifted her attention to another cycle: disease causes families to lose income, and lack of medical care makes disease harder to manage. The English introduction of the Tzu Chi Medical Foundation summarizes this turning point as the observation of "poverty caused by illness," viewing healthcare as an extension of charitable work. ⁴

In 1983, the Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital broke ground; after opening in 1987, the hospital adopted a system that did not require hospitalization security deposits. Data from the National Museum of Taiwan History indicates that this practice later prompted the then-health authority to order major hospitals to abolish the hospitalization security deposit system. This was a larger turning point than "a charitable institution built a hospital": relief began to touch the system itself. ⁵

The Tzu Chi Medical Foundation currently states that it operates six hospitals in Taiwan and arranges for medical professionals to participate in overseas services through the International Medical Association. Such self-descriptions cannot directly replace government statistics, but they show how Tzu Chi describes its role: volunteers, doctors, and transnational medical actions are placed on the same service chain. ⁴

📝 Curator’s Note: Once charity enters the hospital, the question changes. It no longer only asks "whether to help," but also "who is responsible, how to train, and how to make a single aid act into long-term care."

What Disaster Sites Need Is More Than Supplies

In 1991, Tzu Chi launched overseas emergency relief after Cyclone in Bangladesh. A Brookings review of Taiwan’s humanitarian aid also mentions that Tzu Chi later participated in the 1999 Hurricane Mitch in Central America, the Kosovo refugee crisis, and earthquake relief in El Salvador, Peru, and India in 2001. These events gradually revealed Tzu Chi from a local Hualien organization to a humanitarian actor of Taiwan. ⁶

But "going international" does not mean copying the same process unchanged overseas. A 2020 study published in Voluntas points out that Tzu Chi’s experience in the US brought two changes: new cognitive frameworks, and learning about organizational forms. Researchers therefore view Tzu Chi’s internationalization as a co-evolutionary process, rather than a one-way export path. ⁷

This observation is important. When Tzu Chi encounters different laws, religions, ethnicities, and NGO ecologies overseas, the volunteer culture formed in Taiwan must be re-translated. The object of translation is not just language, but also practical issues such as "who can join," "who can represent the organization," and "how relief collaborates with local governments." ⁷

Brookings’ analysis also reminds us that Taiwan’s humanitarian aid has always overlapped with diplomatic space, international visibility, and resource constraints. Tzu Chi’s ability to enter disaster zones often relies on civil networks and volunteer speed; but an organization based in Taiwan also encounters limitations in cross-border access, political pressure, and logistics capacity. ⁶

The 2024 Hualien Earthquake: How Routine Volunteers Become Response Capacity

The 2024 Hualien earthquake provides a window closer to today. A research team from Taipei Medical University interviewed personnel at Tzu Chi’s Central Emergency Operations Center and on-site volunteers, then used thematic analysis to identify five factors: disaster management, organizational capacity, multi-level government collaboration, transformation of routine activities, and psychological support for victims. ³

This study’s sample is small, consisting of only two semi-structured group interviews, so one cannot directly apply every Tzu Chi rescue to the same result. Its value lies in pointing out an easily overlooked fact: disaster response does not start only after a disaster occurs; routine volunteer activities, material preparation, and cooperative relationships have already been accumulating mobilizable capacity. ³

The study also notes that Tzu Chi considers workload and mental health when deploying volunteers, and incorporates psychological support into evacuation shelter services. Here, "care" refers not only to distributing supplies, but also to ensuring that in strange and chaotic spaces, victims have someone to talk to and someone to know where to go next. ³

This gives the five-cent story a new echo. Five cents alone cannot handle a major earthquake, but daily repetitive participation may form long-term familiarity with people, materials, information, and trust. Tzu Chi’s scale is ultimately presented by whether the site can quickly find people, assign tasks, and connect with the government and community, rather than just presenting total donation amounts.

How a Religious Organization Became an International NGO

An Airiti Library entry on volunteer network research analyzes how Tzu Chi mobilizes volunteers through participant observation and in-depth interviews. The study points out that Tzu Chi transforms "serving the public" into activities ordinary people can participate in, then maintains a tight volunteer network through information dissemination, organizational structure, humanistic management, and organizational culture. ⁸

Another thesis studying Tzu Chi volunteers from a resource mobilization perspective breaks down recruitment and management into eight dimensions: activities, organizational vision, media, leadership, community volunteers, training and assessment, professional division of labor, and hierarchy. These terms sound like management science, but they actually answer how Tzu Chi turns "wanting to do good" into practical procedures for multi-person collaboration. ⁹

This is also an easily overlooked tension in Tzu Chi’s story: its language comes from Buddhist compassion, but its operation must face modern organizational training, professionalism, information, and responsibility allocation. As the organization grows larger, the founder’s aspiration cannot single-handedly complete every medical, rescue, or educational decision; aspiration must enter the system, and the system must accept external scrutiny.

A Cambridge study calls Tzu Chi’s development in the US a case study of moving from a Taiwan NGO to an international NGO. The word "becoming" is more accurate than "expanding": it implies that internationalization is not just adding more branches on a map, but that the organization must relearn how to be understood, how to cooperate, and how to prove its reliability in different societies. ⁷

After Charity Becomes a System, Who Writes History?

An organization active for over half a century leaves behind a vast amount of its own archives, publications, images, and oral histories. Activities introduced by the Academia Historica and the Taiwan Oral History Society mention that Tzu Chi launched larger-scale oral history work about 20 years ago, organizing materials such as sutras, history, essays, arguments, and precepts under the "Tzu Chi Collection." These records are important internal memories, but also remind readers: how an organization remembers itself is itself a social phenomenon worth studying. ¹⁰

Therefore, reading Tzu Chi cannot only read success stories, nor can it end with just a label of "religious charity group." The founder’s life, housewives’ change, hospital systems, overseas access, volunteer training, and government collaboration each require different types of sources. Tzu Chi’s official history page is suitable for explaining how the organization understands its starting point; museums and academic research help readers place this self-narrative into the context of Taiwan’s society and international NGOs. ^{1 2 7}

Here lies a continuing challenge: the moral sense of charity easily makes organizations appear immune to questioning, but the larger, transnational, and religiously mission-driven the organization is, the more it needs to clearly explain how decision-making, resources, and responsibility operate. Tzu Chi’s future lies not only in whether it can deliver aid to the next disaster zone, but in whether it can keep goodwill transparent, learnable, and trustworthy within the system.

The Echo Left by Five Cents

Returning to Hualien in 1966, what is most worth remembering is not how much the five cents accumulated into, but how it changed the question of "who can do charity." When a housewife puts change into a bamboo tube, she simultaneously gains a position: she can observe the community, participate in visits, and give her time to an action larger than herself.

Sixty years later, Tzu Chi’s work already includes healthcare, education, international disaster relief, environment, and humanities. Its scale forces it to face professionalization, transnational collaboration, and public responsibility, but the earliest organizational imagination remains clear: turning abstract compassion into something the next person can do today. ^{2 4}

This may be Tzu Chi’s most interesting reminder for Taiwan. Public action does not necessarily start with a huge sum; it may also start with a fixed, small, repeatable habit; and if a habit can be properly taken over by an organization, it may go from Hualien’s vegetable market all the way to global disaster sites.

Further Reading

To see how Tzu Chi describes its own starting point, read Tzu Chi Global Official History; to understand how it became an international NGO, read Cambridge’s 〈Becoming INGO: A Case Study on Taiwan’s Tzu-Chi in the United States〉; to see organizational research on the 2024 Hualien earthquake, read Taipei Medical University Research Abstract.

References