Notes on Green Stone Fund 's Regrant Program

holywood

Upon Siemenpuu's kind request, I draft some note about our program to share with you. I'm not sure whether it can be helpful or not. Any comment is welcome and It will be my pleasure to share more information about China NGOs in the future. Now China is now in its International Labor Day Vacation.

1. Based on your activities, what is the most interesting element so far within your project?
In our activities, the most interesting element should be our belief to the future value of our program. Different with other programs, you can not immediately find remarkable achievements for the improvement of environment and society, but maybe a lot of very small improvements. In our program, we provide very small grants to small environmental groups’ small projects. We believe that we can help for a much brilliant future of China civil society by utilizing very small resource and giving very small financial assistance to small environmental groups, mostly college student groups, to build up their capacity initially. If this point is not easy to be understood, then we must have a look at the present situation in China. The civil society in China is still in infant phase, too immature comparing with other countries. China has a lot of society problems but till now mostly NGOs are too young and too weak to give sufficient help. We need more people and more groups to join creating a strong civil society. But in the beginning stage, one of our most important jobs is to raise more groups and more elites for this goal. One good choice is to begin from the college students and from the student groups since they are the future of the nation and the elites of a developing country. And one more concern is that even a very small support will benefit much for these students and their groups. We just support their outset. In the future, they will grow up and benefit the society with stronger force. Without the very small support in the beginning stage, they may fail and give up, may not join improving civil society any more since civil society is not a powerful stream in China at all and cannot attract sufficient attention now. They may prefer to take joining companies and government agencies as their career choices. Thus we call our activities as a project for future and it’s a long term job.

2. What would you do differently if you were to start all over again?
I do think our idea is correct and valuable. We would follow this idea but we need improve our working method and make our operation more efficiently and humanisticly.
The special characteristic of our program is that all program members are volunteers and do not get any payment. It means that they have to work for this program in their free time instead of full time. Meanwhile they still need prudently make sure that every given grant will be worthwhile and helpful. Only efficiency can resolve conflicts between working time limitation and high quality. Now we have a grant-making rule that we accept application any time and review it immediately. But we have too many applications and each application needs several grant-making advisors to review together. It’s too hard to meet frequently. Grant-making advisors spent too much time for this kind of communications. Thus we are considering setting up certain rounds, for example half month per round. We will meet and review applications every half month and we will not need to deal with them everyday. Of course, we still need arrange internet interview with applicants and supervise supported activities in any necessary time.
And in the past time, we applied too strict rule for reviewing and approving applications. Now we realized that we should focus more on the key characteristic of applicants’ activities instead of detail plan and operations. Our goal is to support the development of immature groups and we cannot have too strict requirements to their operation techniques. They need to learn from the projects. These projects are even possibly their first projects ever carried out. We give any necessary guidance for their plans and ideas, but also give them enough opportunities to try and to learn. We cannot expect too much that they have got very mature ideas and plans. Idea is the most important, and we should give them a chance to grow up without too strict advance requirements.
   

Best Regards

                Wu Haoliang
                    2005-05-05

^^^^^^^^2005-04-26 05:55:34 ^^^^^^^^^

>
>Would you be interested in being the first to post a small summary of your project
>highlighting only two aspects.
>1. Based on your actvities, what is the most interesting element so far within your
>project?
>2. What would you do differently if you were to start all over again? (What would you
>not do differently if you had to start all over again?)


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