Ho Ming Teh

1995 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Community Leadership from Taiwan. Ho Ming-teh started his civic work after a friend’s motorcycle accident on Chiayi’s potholed roads. He mobilized family members and friends to repair the road at the accident site, then later, other dangerous roads and old bridges. He began a volunteer movement that built new bridges. There followed twenty-five years of volunteer work generating hundreds of thousands of small donations and free weekend labor from young and old citizens alike. Ho and his followers had built simple yet strong bridges that greatly improved lives throughout Taiwan’s rural countryside. Even after his death in 1998, the good work of Ho’s movement, the Chiayi Philanthropy Group, continued.