Buddhist Tzu Chi Education Foundation

Tzu Chi Education Foundation has been aiming to bring solid academic programs to students as well as character education which encompasses the teaching of gratitude, respect, kindness, and compassion. We foster a humanistic global culture by nurturing virtue along with social and environmental responsibility. Our schools and programs enhance moral development through character education with emphasis on high-quality academic instructions. It is also our goal to reach out to the community and work with public schools to offer education and care to underprivileged students.

Tzu Chi Education Foundation utilizes a 3-pronged approach to achieve our goals to build a humanistic society. This includes schools, camps, and Character Education Development Programs. Based on the Buddhist philosophy of kindness and Chinese culture, Tzu Chi Preschools and Elementary School offer a strong bilingual curriculum with additional emphasis on both academia and character education. Tzu Chi Camps frequently held parent-child events, voluntary community services, volunteer training, and student camps to help youths grow a humanistic personality through extra-curricular activities. Finally, our Character Education team are devoted to design lesson plans and proactively partner with public schools to offer programs fostering virtues such as respect and tolerance, responsibility and filial piety, gratitude and contentment, giving and compassion, and courage and emotional control.

Tzu Chi Education Foundation manages four preschools and an elementary school around the country. On its Walnut Campus, Tzu Chi owns a school with capacity for students from preschool to the 12th grade. In addition to traditional school facilities, it has a Life-Science Garden, Environmental Education Museum (planning stage), and Sport Rope Climbing Field (construction stage). Tzu Chi also has a long history of cultivating and training dedicated volunteers who support all our events year round.

Our efforts on inheriting traditional culture and cultivating children's healthy personality have earned recognition from communities around the country. Our first Great Love Preschool in the United States was established in 2006, in Monrovia, California. To date, we have four preschools and one elementary school in California and Texas. Our fifth Great Love Preschool is under construction in Long Island, New York.

Many families are thrilled with our contribution to the community and give us many supports. Many children and their parents fill the bamboo banks with coins every day in response to our call to help the community during the pandemic. We also got the President's Volunteer Service Award (PVSA) from the Federal Government and received supports from the CACC (California Alliance for Community Composting), which will collaborate with us and support our composting project in the near future. In the future, we will continue to help the community build a friendly environment and work on well-beings of families in our community.

For Character Education, the number of public-school students served by these programs grew drastically from 182 in 2013 to 2,264 by 2019, from one public school to four in South California. One of the four schools, Juanita Blakely Jones Elementary, received “Gold PBIS State Recognition Award for students showed great improvement after adopting character education. In 2020, San Bernardino City Unified School District awarded Tzu Chi with the 2020 Volunteer in Action Service Group Award. In the accouchement, the foundation was recognized by its dedication “to teach district students about character education, instilling in them the importance of resolving conflicts in healthy, nonviolent ways.”