Bridging the education gap
Print Edition
ZOU Hao, a 14-year-old student from Anhui Province, had enough trouble with Mandarin and never contemplated learning English. This changed a few years back, when his mother picked up a flyer from their village committee about a Shanghai summer program called Stepping Stones and signed him up.
On the first day, he refused to go to class. He eventually capitulated when his mother said she would sit in on the class with him. At the end of the day, he was fired up.
“Mom, this class is so different!” he blurted out. “They didn’t speak a single Chinese word and it was super fun!”
Stepping Stones is a nonprofit organization that aims to help less fortunate children learn English. It also has a corollary project offering eye care to disadvantaged students.
By the time Zou graduated from primary school in Shanghai, he was scoring 85 or more on English tests. Though his migrant status forced him to return to Anhui for middle school education, he continued his studies there, ranking in the top three in his class.
Stepping Stones works with Shanghai expatriates and local Chinese volunteers to teach English in migrant schools and community centers. It currently has a staff of about 350 volunteers and 6,000 students.
The volunteers also travel to rural schools outside of Shanghai to teach English and run other charitable projects, like eye exams.
Corinne Richeux Hua, founder and executive director of Stepping Stones, left her job in 2005 to work in the nonprofit sector.
She devoted her attention to education and visited migrant schools in Minhang to help determine what resources they needed.
“When I went to these schools, they all asked if I could teach English to their students,” she said. “So I realized that there was crying need for English classes for migrant children. When I visited rural schools in Henan Province, they all said the same thing.”
Migrant and rural children are often disadvantaged in education. They have to compete with urban children from more educated backgrounds, and they often have parents who can’t help them with schoolwork.
Stepping Stones in Shanghai really got started in 2006 when Hua organized a small group of volunteers to teach English in migrant and rural schools.
As more schools joined the program, more volunteers had to be recruited. For Hua, it proved to be a big coordination challenge. By 2010, she was doing it full-time. “We eventually received some funding because we couldn’t sustain the project with just volunteers,” she said. “It was all too much. The funding allowed us to hire a program coordinator and other staff, which has made a big difference.”
The name Stepping Stones was coined in 2008. A year later, the group moved into an office donated by a supporter. In 2012, the Shanghai Soong Ching Ling Foundation became an official sponsor of the program, allowing it to register as a local nonprofit organization.
“For the first seven years, we struggled a bit,” Hua said. “But gradually, with the help of a lot of people, we found the going easier and our reach extended.”
The group’s summer program spans about a dozen different sites in Shanghai and still takes volunteers to rural China, including Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces.
The eye-care component of the outreach services started when volunteers noticed that many of the children attending classes were hampered by poor vision but were too poor to afford glasses.
“We have a sponsor who bought eye-glasses for children in our schools,” Hua said. “Since 2008, we have provided more than 1,500 pairs of glasses in 10 or more schools.”
She said the success of Stepping Stones is attributed to an array of partners, like Aier Eye Hospital, the Walmart Foundation and other non-governmental groups.
Hua said helping the less fortunate warms the heart.
“We see the difference it makes in their schoolwork,” she said. “We see volunteers getting fired up with enthusiasm. Many of these kids had never met a foreigner before. Our contact gives them a wider horizon on the world.”
Karen Chow, a Canadian volunteer, told Shanghai Daily that she worked with Stepping Stones for eight years. She rose to become a staff member in charge of training volunteers.
“My husband’s work brought us to Shanghai,” Chow said. “I was involved in my children’s school — the Shanghai American School — and I came across someone looking for volunteers to teach English in migrant schools. In Shanghai you have foreigners, you have local Chinese and you have the migrant population. But they all don’t connect easily.”
Wang Zhiyu, principal of a school for migrant children in the Pudong New Area, said Stepping Stones has made a big difference.
“They found us online and dispatched volunteers to our school every week,” Wang said. “Our teachers also learned a lot from their classes.”
Stepping Stones celebrated its 10th anniversary on May 8 at the Wellington College International Shanghai. Some 800 people attended the event, which also raised almost 90,000 yuan (US$13,760) to support the work of the organization.
“Stepping Stones’ birthday party was a wonderful way for expats and locals, young and old, to come together to celebrate this organization’s phenomenal achievements in the last ten years," said Rodrigo Duarte, who attended the event.
Sujit Chatterjee, CEO of Tata Consultanty Services (TCA), a major sponsor of the anniversary celerbration, said “I believe cooperations like TCA and the larger Tata group and similar organizations should come forward and help such NGO institutions carry this message forward.”
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