Loving is Caring

Afterword:

When our guest Zhang Jin introduced himself – “My current occupation is partner at China’s largest management consulting firm, but that is just my job. My calling is the Sunshine Heart to Heart Foundation I’m sharing with you today” – I’m sure many in the audience lit up, sensing that “this charity seems a bit different”. Then, as our other guest Xu Shuwen described the foundation further, we became even more convinced that Sunshine Heart to Heart, now 12 years old, really is different.

How it began: at the time of the Wenchuan earthquake, when China’s charitable sector was taking off, three entrepreneurs (two of them graduates of the National University of Singapore) shared a very simple vision. Education had changed their own lives, so they hoped to build 101 Sunshine Hope primary schools across China within ten years.

How it works: co-creation with many partners, systematic and modular

1) From the start, many business owners took part, giving the work a solid foundation. The founders also decided early on to professionalize rather than rely entirely on volunteers, and to value every stakeholder, donors and staff alike.

2) Co-creation with many partners – building a primary school, for example:

• Find a potential matching school through the Project Hope office (possibly in another province or region)

• Work together with the local government: each school’s 300,000 yuan leverages at least 300,000 yuan in matching local funds, plus more local educational resources, to build the village school together

• Visit with corporate partners: companies donate funds and receive naming rights for the school, and the foundation manages and disburses the money on their behalf

• Partner with professional teaching-support organizations such as Teach For China to select and train teachers and match them with the school

3) Improving everything from facilities to teaching resources – empowering not only the children but also the teachers and principals, to create a virtuous circle:

• Reading corners for the children – reading is the cheapest and most cost-effective path to knowledge

• Bringing in professional resources – for example Qinjin Muyu, a leading Chinese education research organization specializing in children’s reading curricula, which developed a training system for village teachers on how to lead children in reading

• Curriculum – delivering inspiring courses that raise teachers’ skills and so their teaching effectiveness

• Broadening principals’ horizons – school management training for principals and academic directors, such as the summer “Out of the Mountains” program

• Enriching teaching through volunteer teaching and more – connecting more university student groups so children can learn interesting subjects during the summer, and inviting teachers from top schools in eastern China to central schools so local teachers can observe their teaching

4) Lighting up lives, person to person – helping children find confidence, helping them get out of the mountains and see that they can actually go higher and further.

For example, Xiao Yifan, a student at the Sunshine Star Hope Primary School in Qulai Town, Ji’an County, Jiangxi Province, won first prize in an English speech contest two years running, in 2019 and 2020, earning trips to Singapore. Because this child went abroad twice, the local education department provided English teachers for the entire district of the township – an impact nobody would have dared imagine before.

To date, the Sunshine Heart to Heart Foundation’s projects cover 213 village primary schools, with more than 3,000 teachers and over 60,000 children – all of whom they want to help keep growing.

This is the power of hand in hand, heart to heart. If you too would like to give from the heart, to be a source of support for these children – a ray of sunshine – please scan the QR code below:

Contact: Tao Lei, Outreach Department, Sunshine Heart to Heart, 15212207227

For the full introduction, please watch the video above.

Shuwen and Jin speak for the Sunshine Heart to Heart Foundation, not for UAC.

Whether you donate or share this post, you become the support – the ray of light – that the children in the mountains long for. For them, as for you and me, light means hope and a future.

More about the Sunshine Heart to Heart Foundation (in Chinese)