慈善机构为贫困儿童募集4千万元

Deng Fei, a journalist from Phoenix Weekly news magazine, told a press conference on Sunday afternoon that the Free Lunch Fund he wants to sponsor would work with a "spring sprout nutrition project" to build kitchens for poorly equipped village schools to provide students there with free lunches.

"Wherever the Amway Charity Foundation builds a new kitchen through its 'spring sprout nutrition project,' we would follow their steps and offer preschool kids and teachers there free lunches, too, by allocating some money from the 40 million yuan in donations that we intend to raise. But we have a precondition: The aided schools must observe the regulations of the Free Lunch for Children program and open a microblog on which they have to make transparent how they've used the free lunch funds."

In fact, the Chinese government has already allocated 16-billion yuan worth of nutrition subsidies to village schools in 680 counties. But Deng Fei said children who attend preschool classes and teachers there were not covered by the subsidies.

This is why he has pledged to help them. Deng says he also will make relevant proposals to the country's educational authorities.

"For instance, teachers in these boarding schools ought to have meals together with the kids. This is a good format. Second, each school should open a microblog that informs the public of its daily expenditures, exerting pressure on school management to keep them away from any opportunity for corruption."
 
After the Free Lunch Fund was launched in April last year by the China Social Welfare Foundation and more than 500 media reporters, including Deng Fei, it raised donations totaling more than 18 million yuan by the end of 2011 and provided lunches for 15,000 students from poor families.

But both Deng Fei and the China Social Welfare Foundation share the belief that they can do more if they team up with a private charity foundation. Miao Li, secretary general of the China Social Welfare Foundation, expresses her view.

"This is an important attempt to explore ways that publicly raised funding would be combined with a private charity foundation to advance the government's good projects to help it maximize the welfare benefits for people at the bottom of society."

Liao Yuling, who is in charge of raising donations for the rural students, says people can pledge contributions on the internet through platforms like Sina's microblog service and Tmall.com or a charity auction evening banquet to be held in mid-June.

Organizers of the two charity projects believe an adequate solution to the problem of providing meals to children in poor villagers requires not only the involvement of the government and welfare foundations, but also support from the media and more importantly, supervision by all members of society.

For CRI, I'm Xu Fei.