微慈善机构:不以善小而不为

Currently, a scheme called "Free Lunch for Children", initiated by journalist Deng Fei and aiming to provide free lunch to poverty-stricken school children, is the most active micro-charity project in China.

Initiated in April 2011, the project has raised a total of 25 million yuan or 3.9 million US dollars. The initiators say that the project has offered lunches for more than 22,000 school-children in 162 schools in poverty-stricken areas, covering 16 provinces in China.

However, the public still have doubts as to how donors can be sure that their money has been used properly.

Although the public can check the daily report from each school on the project's official microblog, it's hard to find the right information under the influx of more than 10,000 pieces of contributions online, Deng Fei is now a member of the project's management board. He says:

"In the past, information has been released through scattered pieces of microblogs. Now we consolidate the information. Our target is to achieve full transparency in the work flow, including fund-raising, fund-allocating and use of funds."

Operational spending of charity has been a focus of public attention.

(upsound) A staff member of the Free Lunch for Children project says all the 7 members of the management board run the project for free. However, some costs have to be considered, such as the cost of fund-raising, sending the receipts of donation, business trips, and allowance for volunteers.

Deng Fei admits it is never easy to achieve "zero- cost operations" for a project such as this.

"Many tasks have to be completed by the teachers of these schools. It's impossible for them to do a job voluntarily for a lifetime; such a cost should be calculated."

According to its 2011 financial statement released through its official microblog, Free Lunch for Children project spent up to 250,000 yuan on the allowance to volunteers and the administrative costs. That constitutes 8 percent of total expenses of the charity, below the 10 percent cap set by government regulations. Whether the cost of operations should be disbursed from the donations or raised in another manner is an issue which still requires further discussion.

Besides regulating operating costs, how to go about creating a financial report in a more professional manner, with a clear statement of daily income and expenses, so that the public can adequately supervise institutions like this, is another issue yet to be resolved.

"We hope software can be developed to collect data from each school everyday, and bring about real-time updates of donations received and the expenses that they go towards."

Free Lunch could be an example for other charities based on social networks. Head of the Beijing Normal University One Foundation Philanthropy Research Institute Wang Zhenyao believes it's time to make the developing project more professional.

"In the future development, the project must be operated by professionals. As the Free Lunch project is donated by people though microblog on the internet, it should provide much clearer reports to donors."

Wang adds there are still many challenges to be solved for the project, such as how to attract professional people to work for it, and how to make the project more transparent. Free Lunch project is seeking a third party to release and audit their financial statements.

For CRI, I am Zhang Wan.