This is part two of One Bao blogger Zhai Minglei’s post about his conversation with Jet Li. Jet Li talked about his experience of running a privated own NGO in China and why and how to work together with state-own NGO China Red Cross. Part one is here.
Our own Rules
Maybe some people don’t understand Chinese charity system, but One Foundation is not coming (to you) to complain. We never suggest anything, never complain or criticize. We only do what need to be done. We work under the current system, that’s why we found Jet Li One Foundation Project under the name of China Red Cross. Any donation to One Foundation via Red Cross are managed by One Foundation, Red Cross can’t use a penny. But we have to get Red Cross’s consents and approval whenever we want to use the fund. It is a two-way surveillance which is designed under China’s current system. We want to cooperate with Red Cross and maintain a platform to work together.
We have 15 full time workers (13 before the earth quake). We raised 63 million RMB from over 700,000 individual and get links from over 100,000 web pages to our website. A dozen major portals, such as Tecent.com, Taobao.com and MSN Live are our partners.
In the meanwhile, One Foundation has provided a platform for 70+ grassroots NGOs to work together. We leverage our legal identity (under China Red Cross) in China to aggregate grassroots strength. Therefore, One Foundation is organized under western style rules - hard ware, but operated in Chinese style management arts - software.
What can a grassroots NGO do?
My biggest learning in Sichuan earthquake rescue on what ONE Foundation or other grassroots NGOs can do is: Helping the government in the blind spots. Governmental relief is not always detailed oriented. For example, the government might only responsible for shipping the relief materials to towns with a certain population, but not to remote smaller villages. So we organized people to carriage food and water to the remote villages. We need helps from local grassroots NGOs to accomplish this mission and they made it. I was moved by them.
Grassroots NGOs have their unique features: independent and allying. A grassroots NGO can’t be as big as giant government organization or cooperation, but need to be flexible and located wide-spread. They should not be merged. Once merged, they are no different from governmental organizations. One foundation’s role is an assistant to the government, who makes public’s voice heard as a coordinator, but not a trouble maker.
Problem in Relief
As China has special regions for economy development (such as Shenzhen), there should be some “special regions” for commonweal. One Foundation wants to be one of these special regions. During the Sichuan earthquake relief, One foundations Project’s relationship with China Red Cross is a special case. We are under the China Red Cross HQ directly. The leaders in Red Cross are very wise and open. They accepted some of our suggestions very quickly. A privated owned foundation changed state-owned Red Cross. But regional Red Cross chapters are usually under double supervisions from: local government and China Red Cross HQ, which will create conflicts. For instance, China Red Cross HQ wanted to ship a batch of important relief materials to Shifang(什邡), but the province government wanted to ship them to Jiangyou (江油). At the end, local Red Cross had to follow the lead of local government. Another problem is not enough man power. For example, the traffic to our website and Red Cross website increased 10 times on the first day after earthquake. We have the support to solve the server overload problem very quickly. But Red Cross doesn’t have the right resource to fix it, rumor saying the site was hacked very soon.
So One Foundation never rants. If complaining helps, we will do it. Have you ever seen a situation where rants can change the system and regulation? Rants about China have never stopped, but there are still plenty of enterprises thriving in such a problematic environment. Why some people can achieve their goals in such hard conditions?
A Global Family
The total amount of charity fund raised in China is RMB 2 billion in 2002, 10 billion in 2006 and 30 billion in 2008. But it only accounts for 0.075% of our GDP. In US, the number is several hundred billion USD, 2.75% of US GDP. Differ from other NGOs in China; we want to build a healthy recycle of fund raising and relief, we committ to a long term charity, a sustainable and responsible model.
Currently, natural disaster relief is still our number one focus. We also focus environmental protection, medical treatment, education, poverty problems. We will hold an annual global charity forum in BoAo Asia Forun forwww.boaoforum.org/. It will be like a temple fair, or a trade show, or a speed date. All we want to do is allow NGOs from the world to share their visions, and let Politian’s, entrepreneurs, managers and NGOs to meet up.
One foundation, one family. This is our vision. Not just what we say, but what we do.
- End
Other resources:
