China’s First Middle School Philanthropy Course Launched

On September 20th, Youth Philanthropy Academy (Hereinafter, YPA) launched the first session of its Pursuing Philanthropy course with a Grade Six class of 40 students at No.4 Middle School Affiliated with East China Normal University in Shanghai (Hereinafter, HuaSi). We at YPA have just finished our 3rd session.

Course Overview

Modern philanthropy is a relatively new concept in China. Even though Chinese philanthropy is developing very fast in recent years, youth philanthropy and youth philanthropy education are not even budding. If you are interested in my observation on youth philanthropy landscape in China and why we embarked on this youth philanthropy education journey, check it out.

YPA’s vision for this course is to develop a curriculum kit that could be adopted by the school system where teachers from respective schools can teach on their own with support from YPA.

With this vision in mind, we have been very strategic about the launching partner. We are happy to partner with HuaSi, a public school in Shanghai. Sophie Zhang, the principal, has a passion for education and a rare capability combining innovative thinking and detailed execution. She shares our passion and vision on youth philanthropy education. In fact, HuaSi has just been awarded Shanghai’s Top 10 Charitable Campus on September 29, 2018 for an amazing faculty volunteer program. We also hope HuaSi’s affiliation with East China Normal University could help build the Train The Trainer network in the future.

This course is the first curriculum in China taking a systematic approach to teach philanthropy to middle school students. It’s 3-module curriculum spans two semesters.

This fall semester, we are going to cover the first two modules in 13 weekly sessions.

• Module 1 Understand Philanthropy: students will learn the definition of philanthropy, dig into the 4Ts (time, talent, treasure, ties), motivations, impact, and diversity of philanthropy, and practice kindness.
• Module 2 Find Spark: students will explore their values, interest, and talent, and then connect their discovery with the issues they care about.

We will spend the whole spring semester 2019 on Module 3 Explore Community. Students will get to know their school community and residence community through a variety of activities, such as community mapping, researching community issues, and visiting nonprofit organizations.

At the end of the course, students should be able to connect what they have learned about philanthropy, themselves and the community, and come up with their own philanthropy action plan.

Exciting Student Progress

Although we’ve done only 3 sessions, I have been very encouraged by students’ enthusiasm for philanthropy and excited about their progress. I’ll just share a little story to give you a glimpse.

After Session 1, students interviewed 4 types of people on their thoughts and feelings about philanthropy. When they came back for Session 2, they organized the information they had collected and put the information into different columns. ( See picture below )

Obviously, students thought most of the interviewees were knowledgeable and optimistic about philanthropy in China. It looks like many interviewees have participated in charitable activities.

It was really interesting to see the students’ perspective. In reality, most people in China don’t know much about philanthropy and haven’t had much experience in giving.

Later at Session 2, students were introduced to the definition of Philanthropy. I like how Learning To Give defines philanthropy. considering the Chinese translation of common good might be a bit confusing for Chinese kids at this age, I made some little changes:

Philanthropy is giving your time, talent, treasure and ties to make the community, the society and the world a better place.

We dived into the 4Ts at Session 3. Students revisited the charitable actions their interviewees did, and categorized the actions under the 4T. (See picture below)

Without me saying a single word, they immediately realized:

• Most actions are giving “treasure”, such as donating money, clothes and books.
• There was hardly any action under Talent and Ties. (The sticker notes you see under the Talent and Ties were added after the discussion, and didn’t reflect the interviews.)

I have intentionally created some volunteer opportunities at the end of each session. Not surprisingly, at the end of Session 3, students were pumped to take up on the volunteering opportunity using their talent and ties to share what they’ve learned about philanthropy on social media, an action which was not responded to well last week.

Wow! I am really happy to see how fast students can grasp a concept that’s totally new to them, and how willingly they are to put their learning into action!

Kindness Challenge

Another story I would like to share is that we are going to run a semester-long kindness challenge in the class as a practice component of the course. We plan to make it into 2 phases.

The first phase is a 4-day crash challenge starting from Friday, October 12th. The whole class of 40 students is committed to making at least 250 acts of kindness to make a 10-meter Chain of Kindness as a gift for the school’s 10th anniversary on October 18th. I hope this “crash” challenge would give students a taste of giving and receiving kindness, and experience a sense of accomplishment and pride when presenting this gift to the school on such a very special occasion.

For the second phase, I plan to guide students through weekly themes on kindness, such as caring, respect, gratitude, etc.

Students have formed a Philanthropy Committee to implement the Kindness Challenge. The committee kicked off the challenge in class on Thursday, October 11.

I played a couple of videos for the students, including one made by The Great Kindness Challenge. Students were so engaged. One student told me afterward that seeing what kids from other countries are doing on kindness and philanthropy really made her want to be part of it. Wow!

I can’t wait to see how this crash-challenge will turn out. In fact, I got so excited that I have decided that I’m going to join them on this challenge myself:D

Let’s Connect for a greater impact!

As many of you may have known, philanthropy in China is still at a very nascent stage. Youth philanthropy education is a brand-new concept. Moving forward, YPA has to deal with a lot of challenges and constraints, such as misconceptions and distrust on philanthropy, and lack in infrastructural support. However, I believe here and now offers the greatest opportunity to help shape a field and foster a new generation of givers.

Although YPA is at the very beginning of our journey, we have gratefully got support and help from a lot of people outside China. As someone who has personally experienced the power of global connection, I strongly believe in cross-country collaboration.

Meanwhile, designing and teaching this course is a new experiment for me. I feel like fueling the airplane as it flies through the air.
I plan to share YPA’s journey on starting youth philanthropy education in China, our progress and challenges. I would sincerely invite you to connect with us.

• Ask us questions.
• Challenge us.
• Share your experience and expertise.
• Explore collaborative possibilities.
• …….

You can’t underestimate how much impact your support would bring about! Together we can really make this world a better place!