New university students in need benefit from Project Hope

People meeting Wu Xinru for the first time are impressed with her optimism as a new first-year student at the School of Mathematics at Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province.

But the young woman from Qingchuan county in Sichuan attributes her optimism partly to a project to help low income students like herself launched by the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the Communist Youth League of China and Sichuan Youth Development Foundation

With their help, Wu was one of the 300 low income students in Sichuan to receive a grant of 5,000 yuan ($736) last month, which can used to buy bus or train tickets to their institutions of higher learning from their home and cover the cost of living on campus.

"When I was a baby, my father suffered a serious head injury in a traffic incident and he partially lost his ability to work," Wu said.

"When the Wenchuan earthquake took place in 2008, my hometown in Qingchuan was almost leveled to the ground. To earn a living, my mother went to work in the city of Guangyuan (which oversees Qingchuan) alone. But a blaze burned 80 percent of her body in March 2009 and she basically lost her ability to work," she said.

To care for Sichuan students in need like Wu, the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the Communist Youth League of China and the Sichuan Youth Development Foundation launched the I Want to Attend University project, in 2011 as part of Project Hope.

Since then, I Want to Attend University has raised more than 65 million yuan and assisted more than 13,000 university students in financial straits.

With the strong backing of enterprises like the Agricultural Bank of China, Kweichow Moutai, the Sichuan Branch of the China National Tobacco Corporation, Banking Association of Sichuan and Blue Sword, the Sichuan Youth Development Foundation has raised more than 6.6 million yuan this year, planning to support more than 1,200 low income university freshmen, said Tang Jingtian, deputy secretary of the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the Communist Youth League of China.