POVERTY ALLEVIATION BY EDUCATION

The YouChange Evergreen Volunteer Teaching Program

The YouChange Evergreen Volunteer Teaching Program is based on the advocacy of YouChange’s neo-philanthropy concept. It was initiated by YouChange in 2015 and relies on YouChange’s Volunteer Stations and other cooperating organizations. The program mobilize experienced but retired teachers from urban cities as volunteers and dispatches them to schools in the impoverished regions. They will educate and train the local teachers and school principals to be better at teaching and management. This will improve the school management and education standard, also it will create more capable volunteers for the future. The project uses innovative methods to mobilize retired teachers from urban cities so rural schools can “share” the quality education resources from urban cities. It is an innovative model for poverty alleviation in education. It reduces the education gap between rural and urban schools.

From 2011 to 2015, The Evergreen Volunteer Teaching Program have been running in 8 provinces including: Yunnan, Guangxi, Anhui, Hebei, Chongqing, Shanxi, Jiangxi and Inner Mongolia and covering 22 counties in China. It has recruited 3,814 volunteers and running at 494 schools in rural and county regions. The volunteers have served a total of 406,784 hours. There were85,406 teachers and 1,187735 students benefited from this program. It alsoinvited professional volunteers to revise the “project operation handbook”, “assessment report” and Proposal. As of November 2016, the program  has increased 270 schools, increased served hours 26,306, and increasebeneficiary of 9,420 teachers and 159,964 students.

Evergreen Online and Offline Cooperative Sharing Education
AKA Shuangshi Teaching Program

Shuangshi Teaching is another innovative program launched by YouChange Foundation. It aims to reduce the education gap between urban and rural regions. It uses MOOC model and internet to deliver high quality educationmaterials to rural schools. It uses internet to teach The High School Affiliated toRenmin University of China’s math classes (from grade 7 to 9) to rural schools every day. Through this program, most of the rural students’ academic records have improved rapidly. The achievement of this program has alsoimproved significantly. Its operating costs are relatively low, the model canbe easily replicated, and the urban teachers accompany rural teachers to achieve education goals to rural students. It has became the pioneer model for "Companion Teacher's Training" program and developing rapidly in 832 impoverished counties and villages in China.

The program has made a lot of progress in the past two years. From first semester of 2015-2016, 23 schools were added to the program. The total number of schools now is 62. 120 schools participated in the “100 school plan” project, and 64 schools are highly active. Currently, the schools which are running the Shuangshi program have expanded to Anhui, Gansu, Jilin, and Tibet provinces. It covers 19 provinces and cities spread across 80 impoverished counties.

In August 2015, the Shuangshi Teaching Program was officially approved by the Central Government of China. In September 2015, the program is advanced into its third year of development. It plans to change from scattered piloting development mode into a whole county, city and provincial promotion mode.

In 2016, Shuangshi Teaching model is launching pilot sites in 74 counties in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. It aims to cover all the main subjects from grade 3 to year 9.