Yang Xiangyang, President of the Shenzhen Municipal Government Investment and Development Co., Ltd.

Yang Jianheng, Owner of Sunsing Tea

Zheng Haitao, President of Shenzhen Jiufu Investment Consultants Co., Ltd.

Zheng Shaoxing, Famous Auctioneer

Zheng Weihe, Huang Li, Shenzhen Tongchuang Wai Yip Asset Management Co., Ltd. CEO, Founding Partner

Zhao Yinyin, Famous Pianist

Zuo Jin, Famous Artist

Zhang Wei, President of Cheng Tai Information Technology Co., Ltd., President of Mana Garden, Founder of the Mana Foundation

(The above list is sorted alphabetically by last name)

Special thanks

CITIC Bank Credit Card Center Ai · Xin · Hui, China UnionPay, China International Capital Corporation Limited, Shenzhen Wei Yue Creative Investment Co., Ltd., Shenzhen Xiang Shehui Restaurant Management Co., Ltd., Yuanzheng Investment Development Co., Ltd., Jiu Fu Investment Advisory Co., Ltd. , China Silver Land Investment Co., Ltd., Thunder Tiger Robot Industry Co., Ltd., China Merchants Fund Management Co., Ltd., Tongchuang Venture Capital Co., Ltd., Northern Light Venture Capital Co., Ltd., Suning Cloud Commerce Group Co., Ltd., Yingxiang Co., Ltd., Golden Land (Group) Co., Ltd., Shenzhen Art State Art Center, Excellence Home Group Co., Ltd., Four Seasons Hotel, Shenzhen Orange Vientiane Communication Co., Ltd., Shanghai West Street Information Technology Co., , Shenzhen Times China Entertainment Media Co., Ltd., Shenzhen Shandai Tea Industry Chain Co., Ltd., Otto Packaging and Transportation Co., Ltd., Shenzhen City, Shenzhen Runzhiyuan Potable Water Technology Co., Ltd., First Road Show, Shenzhen Yuanyehua Co., Shenzhen Mingshang View Advertising Co., Ltd., Shenzhen Inspire Advertising Co., Ltd., EBEY Information Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., Greater China Overseas Chinese Cultural Exchange Base

Educational Assistance – A beautiful school is not everything

Only by arousing students’ passion can we renew their interest in learning

Business ideas are the key to success as a charity

Your cross-boundary work has started a new season

Lift your head and see the budding leaves blowing in the wind

On August 23, at the recording of the 4^th CCTV Charity Night, the Chairperson of the Adream Foundation and Cross-boundary Charity Activist Pan Jiangxue was honored with the “CCTV Charitable Person of the Year” award. Environmental Protection, Education Assistance, Poverty Alleviation, Elderly Care, and Disability Assistance were the five main themes of the night, and in the Education Assistance field, Adream has been using forward-looking business concepts, cross-boundary empowerment exploration, and diverse sharing connections to start a new season for charitable education organizations.

We live in a diversifying, individualized era. Even in charity, there is a large call for diversified values. When the list of award recipients is revealed, every charitable person of the year has their own story about moving people through their outstanding contributions. Every one of them represents different aspects and different views on charity. If you look at Adream, it is exploring cross-boundary empowerment, it is business models turned into effective practice. As Pan Jiangxue has said, this is the aspiration of a charity entrepreneur who has done charity for ten years, this is the breadth and depth of a life under a framework of diversified thinking.

During the award ceremony, Pan Jiangxue said “Charity… is a very, very professional affair. Charitable organizations are social organizations, they are platforms for bringing together philanthropy and morality, so how can we give society a clean, transparent answer sheet for love?”

When love grows until it becomes borderless, the world will become more beautiful. On September 5, 2017, just a few hours after China Charity Day, CCTV will hold the 4^th CCTV Charity Night, and conduct the “Ten Charitable People of the Year” awards ceremony.

By Lu Hongyong

Tears welled up in Luo Maoling’s eyes as he addressed the small crowd at the summer camp’s closing ceremony. Over 70 longtime donors to the Adream Foundation had come to the city of Barkam, their families in tow, to participate in the four-day camp. Now the deputy head of the local education authority, Luo has witnessed the charitable foundation’s arc since its pilot program launched in the city of around 55,000 a decade ago. “I was ashamed that we had not implemented the program well,” he said. “We could have done a better job of making ourselves worthy of all these donations.”

Barkam is nestled in the mountains of Sichuan province in southwestern China. It’s predominantly populated by Tibetans, though residents are fairly spread out: The city occupies an area roughly the size of Shanghai but is home to about 0.2 percent of the larger city’s population. When an 8.0-magnitude earthquake devastated the province in 2008, Barkam was mostly spared. Of the estimated 87,600 who died, the quake claimed just eight lives from Barkam, which was only a few hours’ drive from the epicenter but protected by a mountain ridge. Three months before the earthquake, Adream opened its first “Dream Center,” a sort of high-tech reading room for Barkam’s young students.

A decade later, you can still see signs of the earthquake in the mountains lining the raging, lead-colored rivers that snake through that part of the province. Since its founding, Adream has expanded from a single pilot project to 15 schools in the area and countless others across China, contributing the equivalent of 3 million yuan ($446,000) in educational resources — classroom materials, teacher trainings, and online tech support — to the local school system. From its humble beginnings in Barkam, Adream has grown into one of the most influential education charities in China, serving 3 million underprivileged students with 2,600 Dream Centers, mostly in China’s oft-neglected heartland. Though the idea for Adream was conceived in Hong Kong and they are now headquartered in Shanghai, Barkam was ground zero.

In contrast to the philanthropic group’s rampant growth, Barkam itself has stayed more or less the same since the first Dream Center opened. Special instructors at the city’s partner schools are still holding Dream Classes for faculty, as they have for years. Serving as a sort of testing ground for creative teaching methods, these classes are a far cry from the rote learning methodology embraced by many schools in China. Yet because teachers are so often evaluated according to their students’ test scores, many of the Dream Teachers were given the cold shoulder by their peers, who saw little incentive to introduce change in their classrooms. And even if the faculty had been more receptive to the Dream Teachers, having just one per school was rarely enough to make a splash.

Beginning in 2015, Deputy Director Luo managed to transfer the few talented Dream Teachers working in the countryside into schools in downtown Barkam — up the professional ranks, for all intents and purposes. But by that time, most of Barkam’s Dream Teachers had become discouraged and quit. Only 13 remained. The high dropout rate made the program difficult to sustain in Barkam: Despite being Adream’s home base, the city was no beacon of success for other Dream programs to emulate.

Barkam No. 2 Middle School, the program’s flagship institution, saw seven Dream Teachers resign and its Dream Center nearly dismantled. Today, however, the school has a rising star in 26-year-old Cai Wenjun. Expressive, upbeat, and charming, Cai is often invited to travel to far-flung places such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia to train cohorts of China’s 60,000 Dream Teachers, who come from all walks of life and from partner schools all over the country.

China is a notoriously top-down society. For nonprofit and for-profit businesses alike, relationships with the authorities can spell doom or boom — and Adream has understood this since day one. The fact that Barkam’s Party secretary, Zhang Peiyun, and the head of the local education bureau, Liu Rongxin, attended the summer camp’s opening and closing ceremonies, respectively, speaks volumes about the guanxi — interpersonal relationships that facilitate business and other dealings — that the foundation has managed to cultivate in official circles. In fact, the charity counts at least one local government among its donors: In exchange for financial support from Zunyi, a city in southwestern China’s Guizhou province, the organization will introduce Dream Centers at all of the city’s public schools.

With nearly 3,000 Dream Centers now open to students, Adream is hungry for funding to cover both its current overhead costs and its plans for future expansion. So far, increased attention from government bodies has proved beneficial in helping the organization gain funding and an official vote of confidence — along with all the public credibility and influence that carries.

Out in the audience at the camp’s closing ceremony, Zhuokeji Primary School’s headmaster, Yan Bo, is less concerned about Dream Teachers needing training and Dream Centers needing refurbishing. Instead, he’s worried about the very survival of his school. It’s well-run and has a beautiful campus, but at 10 kilometers from the city center, it has trouble retaining students, who are leaving in droves for more central alternatives believed to have more resources at their disposal.

Urbanization is taking a mounting toll on rural schools, and Barkam is no exception. Zhuokeji Primary School was designed for 300 students but currently accommodates just 80. Sure to accelerate what until now has been a steady decline is the fact that just 4 kilometers away, the local government has built a massive new school for over a thousand students. Rumored to have topflight teachers and better facilities, Barkam No. 4 Primary School will open its doors this fall — and may soon force Zhuokeji to shutter its own.

Even after a decade of innovation and hope for Barkam’s schools, deputy education chief Luo has seen three of his young relatives settle down in Shanghai for work. But he understands their decisions: To him, true education stems from an awareness of the wider world — a world the Adream Foundation has opened up to the children of Barkam — and from pursuing the chance to roam and experience new things while we’re still young, willing, and able.

This article is the first in a two-part series on an education charity in China.

In late June, I sat with Wang Fuqiang, a 13-year-old Tibetan boy, on the roof of his family’s cottage in Songgang, an ethnic minority village in Barkam City, located in southwestern China’s Sichuan province. From Monday to Friday during the school year, Wang lived at a boarding house for primary school students, a 10-minute walk away from home across a potato field blooming with blue flowers.

In a tattered T-shirt and a jacket missing a zipper, Fuqiang sat in the sunshine alongside a visitor, a Han girl called Yang Yiyan. The youngest daughter of a Beijing-based property developer, Yiyan is four years younger than Fuqiang, but a little taller. She and her parents had come to Barkam with Adream Foundation, one of China’s most highly regarded education charities, as part of a summer camp for generous donors and their families.

Their respective fathers, Yang Zhongguo and Wang Songbai, chatted downstairs. Unable to bear the crushing poverty of family life any longer, Songbai’s wife divorced him when Fuqiang was little. The government found Songbai work as a security guard in the nearby county-level town, a job that took him away from Fuqiang for long periods at a time. Fuqiang was left in the care of the village primary school: Free boarding is available for all students from grades one through nine in Barkam, along with a monthly 170-yuan ($25) state grant, as long as they stay at school from Monday to Friday.

Fuqiang, who is in the sixth grade, will graduate from Songgang next year. A lover of basketball, his dream is to one day become a coach; at just under 5 feet tall, he says he can’t become a professional player. Too poor to afford new sneakers, he tears across the court in a pair of well-worn old ones. “When I’m happy, I come up here and sleep on the rooftop,” Fuqiang says. “When I’m feeling down, I go and play basketball.”

After a while, the two teenagers come down from the roof and head out toward a patch of ground in the village so that Fuqiang can show Yiyan his backflip. Downstairs, Yiyan’s father tries to cheer Songbai up, encouraging him to find a new wife and make the family whole again. Later that evening, after dinner with the city’s local officials, the Yangs come back to the cottage with gifts: a basketball, a pair of sneakers, and a tracksuit for Fuqiang.

Ten years ago, Adream’s founder, Pan Jiangxue, came to Barkam and set up a well-stocked reading room in the local middle school. Dubbed the “Dream Center” and outfitted with computers and internet access, it became an oasis to a generation of students who otherwise had little opportunity to read anything other than their textbooks. Fuqiang attends one class a week at another Dream Center in Songgang Primary School. Aside from sports, he loves reading and writing.

A decade later, nearly 2,600 Dream Centers has been built across the country. They are used by around 3 million students, mostly in inland China. In addition to donating books and refitting classrooms, Adream has brought new courses and teaching methods to Barkam. The foundation has developed more than 40 “Dream Classes” showing kids how to plan trips, exercise thrift, perform first aid, and even make a fashion show out of scrap newspaper. Backed by local government support, the foundation has trained more than 60,000 teachers at its partner schools.

For many years, Chinese charities have focused on education as a means to bring social equality to future generations. Back in 1989, the China Youth League launched Project Hope through its affiliate, the China Youth Development Foundation, which aimed to lower student dropout rates and improve school facilities. Within two decades, Project Hope raised enough funding to rebuild 13,000 schools and support nearly 3 million students who would otherwise have dropped out of school due to poverty.

However, Project Hope’s work began to decline when the Chinese government guaranteed nine years of free education for all rural students in 2006. At the same time, the rural student population began to shrink, as more and more families migrated to the cities in search of work. Now, many of Project Hope’s countryside schools lie deserted.

Drawing on the lessons of Project Hope, Pan has ensured that Adream has evolved alongside the changing face of education in China. Twenty years ago, the country’s education charities aimed to get every child into a classroom. When Pan started Adream a decade later, it was to build better schools with high-quality facilities. Today, the goal is to inspire a sense of confidence, composure, and dignity among future generations.

Local students dress up in Tibetan costume during a celebration marking 10 years since the founding of the Dream Center at Barkam No. 2 Middle School in Barkam County, Sichuan province, June 26, 2017. Courtesy of Adream Foundation

The first Dream Center in Barkam, built just 10 years ago, is now a museum. Next to it, a sixth-generation Dream Center is preparing for the fall semester, equipped with tablet computers, virtual reality classes, and 3-D printers. Barkam’s local Party secretary, Zhang Peiyun, is also of Tibetan heritage. Along with local education officials, schoolteachers, and the students themselves, he took part in a ceremony to mark the opening of the Dream Center’s latest incarnation.

During the ceremony, four sixth-graders — whose parents are long-time Adream donors — from an international school in Shanghai performed as a string quartet. Sitting on the floor in front of them, the local students, none of whom had been taught music, looked on. Later, a Shanghai-based music teacher gave each local student a colored bell, instructing them to hit it when he called out a certain color. Forty minutes later, the well-drilled local students were providing a splendid accompaniment to the quartet’s version of the famed Chinese song, “Jasmine Flower.”

Donor families take pride in their good deeds and often encourage their children to be philanthropic, too. It is equally important for children from different parts of society to interact with and learn from one another. Most kids from donor families are either studying abroad or preparing to do so. They sit on the opposite side of the wealth gap from their counterparts in Barkam, many of whom can only dream of the luxury of living in a rich, modern metropolis like Shanghai.

In China, the word “underprivileged” used to have a tangible relationship to material poverty: no food, no clothes, and no school. In some places, that definition still stands, but in others, underprivileged children are often exposed to evidence of a vast, but isolated, world of wealth — one which they are locked out of from birth. This is why charitable projects like Dream Centers are so important, for empowering every child to think bigger and casting off the strictures of poverty is key to giving every Chinese student a fair education.

Editor: Matthew Walsh.