NGO pays way for needy students in Shanghai
Print Edition
A special class of students just graduated from the Shanghai Real Estate School, a vocational high school for those entering the property industry. This class included 37 students from impoverished areas of southwest China’s Sichuan Province.
The students were placed in the school by the Shanghai Smiles Foundation, an NGO founded in 2012 that helps financially needy youngsters in underdeveloped areas study in the city.
Just one week out of school, these new graduates will be provided with job opportunities here in Shanghai via cooperation agreements between their school and local property companies.
“Time really flies. They will turn a new page of their lives soon,” says Wu Chunhua, the foundation’s vice secretary general.
As one of those who helped bring this group of students to Shanghai three years ago, Wu says she will never forget the first time she went to Sichuan to interview them.
The process of recruiting students to this altruistic program wasn’t easy. Members of the foundation spent a considerable amount of time persuading local parents and children to accept their help.
“We were suspected as fraudsters when we offered them this education opportunity and to sponsor their living expenses,” Wu recalls. “The students and their parents didn’t believe that such good things could happen in this world.”
Not entirely convinced, some parents even insisted on accompanying their children to Shanghai, where they wanted to see their children go to school with their own eyes.
“I felt very touched when I saw them complete the three years of studies,” Wu says. “Our Smiles Foundation has also grown up with them over the last years.”
While the charitable organization’s main focus is on sponsoring the studies of impoverished teenaged students from western and central China, it also donates school supplies and contributes to projects that preserve various forms of traditional Chinese culture, such as Kunqu Opera and shadow puppetry.
In the first year of the foundation’s existence, it paid tuition and living expenses for several dozen students. Aside from those enrolled in the Shanghai Real Estate School, a separate group of 30 youngsters was placed in the city’s Xiandai Vocational School. By June 2014, the foundation had sponsored a total of 222 students.
According to the foundation’s president and founder Huang Yan, the Shanghai Smiles Foundation was originally conceived as a platform to place needy, yet academically capable, rural students in the city’s increasingly under-utilized vocational training institutions.
“We are finding good qualified students for the schools in Shanghai, and at the same time providing a better future — or at least a helpful experience — for young people in poor areas,” says Huang.
Those involved on the administrative side of the foundation have found plenty of rewards as well.
Wu, who has been with the institution from its earliest days, reflects that “I was just a volunteer at first, but I realized it was not enough to be just a part-time worker if you really want to do something meaningful.”
A former tourism industry professional with a strong interest in philanthropy, Wu’s work at the Smiles Foundation is now a full-time career. The organization’s funds come mainly from its 19 councilmen as well as corporate and individual donations.
In 2012, it donated 898 sports shoes to students in two primary schools in Sichuan and four in Tibet. The following year, six primary schools in Sichuan and one in Guizhou received 1,872 shoes. In 2014, 544 reading lamps were sent to six primary schools in mountainous regions in China.
“Charity should be focused on the details, from the size of shoes that we send to cooperations between local governments and large-school initiatives that help young students attend school,” Huang observes.
Check www.smilesfoundation.cn for more information.
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