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UPDATED: June 4, 2012 NO. 23 JUNE 7, 2012
Hands Together
China is trying more ways to connect NGOs with public foundations
By Yuan Yuan
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HAPPY SMILES: Students in a primary school in Wuchuan County, southwest China's Guizhou Province, have free lunch on March 15 (CFP)

In March 2011, Liang Shuxin, a marketing planner at online community Tianya.cn and founder of Micro Foundation in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, started an online fundraising program to sponsor students in Hongban Primary School in Qianxi County, southwestern Guizhou Province.

Micro Foundation is a non-government organization (NGO) founded in 2010 with the aim of harnessing the power of the Internet to help students living in poverty-stricken areas. After he learnt from a TV program that two thirds of students in some rural areas weren't eating lunch, Liang began to sell virtual lunches priced at 5 yuan ($0.79) apiece on Taobao.com, China's largest C2C site. He told netizens that a donation of 5 yuan could buy lunch for a child.

"At first, I thought it was enough to sell 1,000 lunches, but I was astonished to see 2,048 lunches sold within a day," said Liang. By the end of the month, the number rocketed to about 37,000.

The donations enabled 374 students in two primary schools in Qianxi County to have free lunches, but Liang was facing a new problem.

"We didn't have an official identification to collect donations," Liang said.

At first, the money Liang raised online all went to his personal account. He was eager to find a transparent way to show donors how the money was spent.

The same happened to Deng Fei, a veteran journalist from Phoenix Weekly news magazine, who is better known as the founder of the charity program Free Lunch for Children.

During a reporting trip in February 2011 to Guizhou, Deng was shocked to discover that quite a few schools in the province's rural areas had no canteens for students. The students had nowhere to eat lunch and were hungry during their afternoon classes. The children were so weak from hunger that many schools simply cancelled physical education lessons in the afternoon.

On March 9, 2011, Deng and 500 other media workers initiated the program. But Deng, who initially just wanted to help the schools he visited, soon realized that there are a far larger number of needy students. "The bottleneck for us to carry on is we don't have any qualification to collect money," Deng said.

According to China's Regulations on Administration of Foundations, only government-sponsored foundations are allowed to collect donations from the public. Organizations like Micro Foundation and Free Lunch for Children are not allowed to solicit donations, but are finding new ways to cooperate with government-sponsored foundations to secure funding.

All the good news

Just as Liang was struggling to think of how to carry on, the Guizhou Youth Development Foundation, a public foundation, offered a solution. Yang Zhen, Secretary General of the foundation, contacted Liang to discuss cooperation.

On April 3, 2011, the Guizhou Youth Development Foundation and Tianya.cn relaunched the Micro Foundation with the aim of improving conditions for rural primary school students in Guizhou. The new foundation has the qualification to collect donations from the public. The Guizhou Youth Development Foundation is in charge of supervising the usage of the donations to ensure they are all spent on the students.

"Liang and his group have more experi-ence in organizing charity activities online and they know how to do it effectively," Yang said. "I think our cooperation can provide a new way to boost charity in China."

In early April 2011, Deng also had good news. The China Social Welfare Foundation offered to cooperate with the Free Lunch for Children program.

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