A Shanghai-based organisation that provides support services to China’s growing non-profit sector has set itself ambitious growth targets for the next three years, and is also hoping to enhance non-profit links with business and media.
Zhuang Ailing (庄爱玲), who established the Shanghai NPO Development Centre (上海映绿公益事业发展中心) in 2004, told China Development Brief that the Centre aims to have 20 professional staff in place within three years (up from a present team of five, two of whom are part-time), and an annual operating budget of CNY 5-6 million (USD 625-700,000, up from around CNY 900,000 at present.) These targets, says Zhuang, were set in a recent strategic planning exercise that also emphasised professionalism and quality of service. “We don’t necessarily want to be the biggest, but we want to be first-class quality,” Zhuang said.
In its first two years the Centre has carried out 21 training workshops in areas such as programme and financial management, staff development and volunteer management, fundraising, communications and strategic planning. Services are targeted both to grassroots groups and government social welfare agencies. Organisations with sufficient resources pay a modest CNY 800 (USD 100) per participant to recover part of the costs.
Funding has come mainly from international organisations, including the Ford Foundation, which has made an institutional development grant to the Centre. However, the Centre has also mobilised funding from the Pudong District government in Shanghai, via the Pudong New Area Development Foundation, to train managers of long-term residential institutions and develop management evaluation standards. The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Public Administration and Policy is also partnering in this effort.
Recently, says Zhuang, “We have started to have talk to corporations, especially AmCham (the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai) about how to promote real dialogue between NGOs and corporations.”
Referring to the growth of transnational corporate giving as part of “corporate social responsibility” strategies, Zhuang says that “Most multinationals want to do it by themselves, they don’t know project partners, or else they feel that [grassroots NGOs’] capacity and accountability are not strong enough; there is not enough trust there. They prefer to work with very large NGOs or international NGOs. What we would like to do is to get the two sides to work together.”
Zhuang believes that there have been examples of successful cooperation between grassroots NGOs and corporations, citing a Microsoft funded project to train migrant workers in computer skills, which in Shanghai has been delivered by a local NGO, Grassroots Community (热爱家园). However, she says, if initial projects go wrong there can be serious loss of trust and “this can put off the corporation for a long time.”
Starting in October, the Centre will host a first “dialogue meeting” that will bring together several corporations identified by AmCham with non-profit groups that, in the Centre’s view, have the capacity to put corporate donations to good use.
The Center has also facilitated seminars and conferences to promote multi-sector dialogue. In August a series of forums on “Volunteerism and Harmonious Society” set out, says Zhuang, to stimulate “the social responsibility of corporations, youth, government, NGOs and media.”She feels that the time is ripe for this step towards strengthening relations between non-profit organisations and media, noting that “Before, it was very difficult to contact media for stories related to volunteering and philanthropy, but the media are much more pro-active now.”
Also planned in the next few months are workshops to introduce the concepts of “social marketing” and “social entrepreneurs” to Chinese non-profit groups, as well as governance, leadership and monitoring and evaluation training events. In October a training workshop in Xiamen, on strategic planning and leadership, will be targeted at organisations working in the field of disability.
In a non-profit sector that is still young, Zhuang Ailing stands out as an experienced development practitioner. She worked for eleven years with the Nanjing-based Amity Foundation, managing blindness prevention and sight restoration projects in collaboration with Christian Blind Mission International, and went on to serve for a year as Deputy China Programme Manager for the US-based eye care non-profit organisation, Orbis International. Meanwhile, through part-time study she picked up a Nanjing University doctorate with a thesis that compared the development of the “people-established” (minban) Amity Foundation with the government-initiated China Youth Development Foundation; and she also spent a year at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government studying for a Masters of Public Administration.
On her return from Harvard, Zhuang considered teaming up with one of the Chinese organisations already devoted to NGO capacity building. Pioneers in the field were the Beijing NPO Network, established in 2001, and CANGOS (the Chinese Association of NGOs) which had, in the late 1990s, grown out of the China International Centre for Economic and Technical Exchange, a government agency established in the 1980s to manage UN cooperation with China. In the end Zhuang decided to stay in Shanghai and create a new support organisation there to serve the rapidly developing non-profit sector in southeast China; but she has remained close to both of the Beijiing based organisations, which are represented on the NPO Development Centre’s Board and Advisory Committee.
Report by Nick Young, September 20, 2006