Web drives personal urge to give

Yu Zhihai used to have a decent job in a foreign telecom company like most of his peers. But the 36-year-old seems be more satisfied with his new job: helping poor Chinese schoolchildren via the Internet.

As the founder of 1KG.org, a domestic non-governmental organization (NGO) that encourages people to bring daily necessities to children in nearby schools when they are hiking, Yu quit his job in 2006 and established a team to help poor Chinese kids in remote areas.

Last year, Yu's organization made 250 trips to Chinese schools, with participants reaching over 10,000 children.

"We use the Internet to promote our idea from the very beginning because it is the most cost-effective way to spread our idea," said Yu, a travel fan. "Our goal is to establish a service platform to those who want to help others."

Evolved from a personal blog that recorded Yu's earlier experience in communicating with poor schoolchildren, 1KG.org now provides information on nearly 600 schools in China's rural areas, which often run out of items such as books, pencils and basketballs.

Participants can contact nearby schools for their needs before hiking and personally carry supplies to the children.

Yu said over 90 percent of the school information is collected and uploaded by participants and his five full-time staff members.

The organization is now talking with Google China to help promote the Internet search engine's charity program that aims to provide eggs to malnourished Chinese schoolchildren.

"We know those who need help and who want to help. With our online network, we could easily expand other programs to a large extent," said Yu, adding that his next goal is to attract corporate participants.

'Onlinthropy'

Traditionally, China's charity activities have been dominated by the government, which has taken care of almost everything, from spotting needy recipients to proposing donations to delivering donated goods.

But with the rise of the Internet, which can connect people via instant messaging and social networking, Chinese are finding it easier to give help in their own way.

Shi Xu, charity program manager of YeePay, a Chinese e-payment company, said his firm helped raise nearly 300,000 yuan after the snowstorm that hit south China in February 2008. Donations surged to over 180 million yuan for the Sichuan earthquake in May, with the majority coming from individual Internet users.

"Foundations still play a major role in China's charity activities and their major job is to raise money from corporate companies or government organizations," Shi said. "But the power of individuals could be tremendous if they are well-organized."

Compared with the traditional way of raising money, online donations can be more easily traced. Donors can also have more say in where their money will be used.

More importantly, online donation can become a habit through users' daily online activities: For example, people could subscribe to certain online programs that charge users a small amount of money every day. These activities could also be shared and expanded through ways like instant messaging or social networking websites to people's friends.

Pony Ma, founder and CEO of Tencent, China's largest instant messaging service company, said his firm is working on a platform that connects individuals with their favorite charity programs and enable users to communicate and share charity experiences online with their friends.

"Users may have different concerns and interests for charity programs but the traditional way of donating could only take care of big programs," said Ma. "What we want to do is to get together those who want to help and those who need help."

According to China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), Web users in China reached 298 million by the end of last year, nearly equivalent to the entire population of the United States. Among them, 52 million have online payment accounts.

Wang Zhenyao, deputy-secretary of the Social Welfare and Charity Industry Office under China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, said charity has became a fashion in China after the Sichuan earthquake and the power of the public has proved itself in the disaster, bringing fundamental change to people's traditional way of charity.

He said over one million Chinese people came to Sichuan after the earthquake as volunteers without the organization of government and public donations related to the disaster reached nearly 70 billion yuan, equivalent to that raised by the government.

Yun Qi, a Beijing white collar worker who helped organize a website that encourages people to donate to charity through daily online shopping activities such as booking tickets and hotels, said her site's biggest difficulty is gaining people's trust. "People will doubt your purpose as long as it involves money," said Yun, who now works part-time on the program with two friends. "We plan to first try to convince small companies to join our program," she said.

According to Chinese laws, only non-government organizations are qualified to raise money from the public. But the Chinese government has long been wary in giving green lights to NGOs. Raising money also requires great efforts in tracing and monitoring each transaction.

"We never encourage people to donate money and one of the reasons for that is we are not yet capable in dealing with money," said Yu from 1KG.org.

Although difficulties exist, Shi Xu from YeePay is still confident about online donation. "Barack Obama's winning presidential campaign relied heavily on online donations, so I'm confident that this trend will also bring some changes in China," he said.

(China Daily 03/09/2009 page10)