Charity program scoops awards

The hospital schools project launched by the New Sunshine Charity Foundation recently won the "Outstanding Project" award at the Beijing Public Welfare Venture Competition.

It was presented on Sept 28 at a charity conference organized by the Social Work Committee of the Beijing Municipal Committee, the Beijing Civil Affairs Bureau and the Capital Philanthropy Federation. The foundation also won the "Capital Charity Award".

The "hospital schools" project was launched in 2012. Since then, the foundation has cooperated with hospitals nationwide to establish teaching spaces in and outside the premises to provide education for children ages 3 to 14 with serious illnesses, such as leukemia, who need to receive long-term treatment in hospitals.

The foundation set up the project after receiving a painting from a boy named Zuo Yan.

Wang Anhua, the project director, said Zuo had only been at elementary school for three months when he was forced to drop out after being diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia, a condition in which the body stops producing sufficient new blood cells.

A volunteer club at Peking University, which had been home-schooling Zuo, sent the painting to the foundation in 2012.

Zuo had depicted a bald boy who attended school wearing a mask and carrying a book bag. He had written on the painting, "I want to go to school."

From Zuo's painting, Wang said the foundation realized that a large group of hospitalized children, especially those with blood diseases, had such a need because hospitals or their homes were unable to provide a good educational environment for them.

So far, the foundation has opened 37 hospitals schools in 15 provinces and cities, with 28 full-time teachers and nearly 800 volunteers. The project has helped 85,970 children, according to the foundation's statistics.

Since the COVID-19 epidemic started last year, many schools have moved their classes online because some hospitals have banned volunteers from entering. Wang said the online classes have allowed teachers to follow up with the children over the long term without geographical restrictions.

As many children return home between therapies, the online classes also enable teachers to track their progress and "continuously help them overcome problems during their illness and make a smooth return to normal schools", she said.

Wang said the foundation plans to expand the service to cover more children and control the quality of education at the same time.

"We will summarize our past experiences and formulate new standards. We need to think about how to carry out quality control if we want a larger scale, and how to integrate our concepts with front-line service personnel," she added.