PROURGN
合同会社プロウン · TOKYO
Adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities grow, process, pack and sell Tieguanyin here, on gardens the village had left to run wild for ten years.
The lodge was set up jointly by the Xiamen Aihui Autism Rehabilitation Center and Quanzhou Tianxiangyu Ecological Agriculture, and it supports people for life rather than up to an age.
Xidong 25, Lindong Village, Huqiu Town, Anxi County, Quanzhou, Fujian.
Nothing here was planned as a social enterprise. A father solved the problem in front of him, then the next one, and the shape of the thing only became clear afterwards.
Gao Quanfa's autistic son was turned away by nursery and school alike, and families in Fujian were shuttling to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou for therapy. He founded Aihui in Xiamen so that they would not have to. Sixteen years on it has served more than 5,000 children and their families.
Those children reached sixteen. Therapy ends at that age; adult life does not. In the same season, back in his home village of Huqiu in Anxi, Gao found tea gardens that had been left to run wild for ten years.
With the master tea makers Gao Shuimu, Gao Haijin and Gao Yahuang he founded Quanzhou Tianxiangyu Ecological Agriculture and began building. Neglected land became a workplace; the workplace became a home. Tea supports the members, and the members grow the tea.
The gardens are worked without fertilizer or pesticide — Tieguanyin grown the slow way, in mountain air that stays mild through the year.
Growing, first processing, packing and selling all happen on this hillside, and every step has been broken into standard, low-barrier tasks that someone can learn and be paid for.
The reversal is the point: people cast as recipients of help become the ones producing something other people choose to buy — and the village gets its tea gardens back.
The lodge describes itself as one chain, not four separate services: recovery flows into residential care, care into employment, and employment into a place in the community.
Keeping all four in one place means nobody has to qualify for them one at a time — and nobody is moved on when they turn eighteen.
康复 → 托养 → 就业 → 社会融合
Between the tea seasons the art room runs, and the animal that goes on each year's gift box is drawn there. Painting is part of the week here, not a reward for the rest of it.
Not a charity counter selling sympathy — a working tea business that happens to be built around its people. It grows, processes and exports oolong, green, white and black teas, takes on OEM work, and develops gift lines.
Every list price, item by item, is on the reference prices page.
“The children of the stars” is what autistic children are called in China, and it is the phrase the lodge uses for the people it exists to protect.
The lodge aims to become Fujian's first small town built around mountains, tea and independent living for people with disabilities. Ten new residents aged twelve and over are being taken on now.
Prourgn works with the lodge from Japan: buying and placing the tea, bringing Japanese employment-support practice to the site twice a year, and introducing people who want to see it for themselves.
A visit to Anxi, a conversation between support teams, the tea itself, or the study-visit programme — tell us which of those brought you here and we will answer in writing.
We usually reply within two working days. Rieko Yano reads these herself.