An informal, national network of around 45 NGOs serving autistic children and their families has provided both a learning opportunity and an inspiration to the Beijing-based Capacity Building & Assessment Centre (CBAC, 倍能组织能力建设与评估中心), which is now hoping to facilitate similar networks with funding support from an international development agency in Germany.

CBAC’s Director, Ms. Zhang Jufang (张菊芳), was herself contracted to help build the “Heart’s Alliance” (心盟) of autism-related groups but full credit for the initiative belongs, she says, to key members of the network. The pioneering Xingxingyu (星星雨 “Stars and Rain”), established in Beijing ten years ago by Ms. Tian Huiping (田惠平) and now employing 26 staff, played a leading role. Other founding members included the Xi’an-based Lalashou (拉拉手, "Join hands together”), which now has more than twenty staff, the also sizeable Shenzhen Autism Association and a similar group based in Xiamen.

According to Zhang, after initial meetings in 2005 these core members “outreached to more local organisations.” The network was designed, she says, to encourage peer learning and exchange both in developing appropriate responses to autism and in helping front-line organisations with their own development.

CBAC’s role as an external facilitator, says Zhang, has been “to help them design the structure of the network, conduct needs assessments among members, and do training in capacity building, programme design and fundraising.”

Zhang’s relationship with Xingxingyu began in 2003 when the group participated in a capacity building exercise facilitated by the US based non-profit organisation, PACT, which had recruited Zhang as a trainer. This pilot programme, funded by the Ford Foundation, introduced an organisational capacity assessment (OCA) “tool” that PACT had developed elsewhere, and that was adapted in the course of sustained work with six Chinese organisations.

The OCA process, suggests Zhang, encouraged Xingxingyu to create strategic development indicators and, as a relatively stable and mature NGO by China’s standards, to start looking for ways to expand its impact and share its experience with families in other parts of China.

Another participant in the OCA pilot was Beijing Huiling (慧灵), which provides care and support services for mentally handicapped youngsters and their families and which has also been growing steadily. The group was originally established in Guangzhou in 1990 by Ms. Meng Weina (孟维娜). Organisations in eight Chinese cities now sail under the Huiling flag, and Zhang’s CBAC continues to work closely with them.

Steady growth

Non-profit social service organisations have sprung up fast despite the difficult environment for NGO development in China. China Development Brief’s landmark 2001 directory, 250 Chinese NGOs: Civil Society in the Making, was able to identify only two NGOs—Xingxingyu and an association in Dalian—working on autism issues, and at that time there were only two Huiling branches.

The emergence of so many organisations under the Hearts Alliance umbrella thus appears to be a new milestone in China’s NGO development. In 2003, an effort to build a broad “disability platform” in China, supported by Belgian NGO, Handicap International, foundered over lack of consensus about the network’s role and governance.

Meanwhile, PACT closed its China programme office at the end of 2004, passing the baton to Zhang Jufang and two colleagues who registered CBAC as a local organisation dedicated to providing coaching and training services to the fast-growing non profit sector. Zhang has managed not only to keep the localised organisation going but also to expand it, now counting on three full-time and four-part time Chinese staff.

Zhang gained her own grassroots NGO experience working on projects sponsored by Rural Women magazine (previously, Rural Women Knowing All). As well as working with PACT, she has since gained facilitation and coaching experience as a consultant on a Winrock International NGO capacity building programme for Ford Foundation grantees.

As well as ongoing work with Hearts Alliance and Huiling, over the last two years CBAC has provided “NGO basics” training to around fifty, mostly newly-established NGOs, in a programme sponsored by an overseas corporate foundation. The training workshops use a curriculum that CBAC has developed, based on PACT training approaches, with a strong emphasis on peer learning. “Maybe two thirds of the time is spent on learning from each other,” says Zhang. “We stimulate them to share openly and to open their minds to think about vision and core values.”

Most of the trainees are from organisations that are less than three years old, and many of them remain unregistered because of the difficulty of finding government agencies to agree to act as sponsors.

The trainees, says Zhang, are generally aged 20-40, and although “some of the organisations are rather weak,” she has found that “Everyone is eager to learn more about NGO development, how to make their dream more stable, and to fulfil their organisation’s mission. Everyone wants to catch up with the new ideas and to use them in their services.”

In addition, CBAC has provided training on NGO basics and strategic planning for 15 legal aid service centres that are linked in an informal, national network of lawyers working on issues of juvenile justice.

Joining up the dots

Given the evidence that NGO networks are beginning to coalesce, CBAC is actively exploring ways to offer them facilitation support. EED, the largest international service organisation of the German protestant church, has given the organisation a small grant to carry out a needs assessment, with a possible view to then funding a learning network strengthening project over several years.

“We will be looking at existing networks, but also considering the potential for new NGO networks based either on thematic or regional areas of work,” according to Michael Buesgen, an international consultant who recently began to work with CBAC on a CIM progamme placement funded by the government of Germany.

Buesgen previously served in China as an international consultant to Misereor—the German Catholic church’s counterpart to EDE—and in that capacity knew and worked with various Chinese social service NGOs including Xingxingyu and Huiling.

“We hope to identify people in these networks who can become trainers themselves, to increase the resource pool of people who are able to deliver; and we will also encourage NGOs to share resources,” he says.

info@pactchina.org

Report by Nick Young, November 29 2006