On October 23-26, the second station of Lao Niu Foundation (Third Session) Training walked into Henan. 80 responsible persons from foundations, charity societies, social service agencies all over the country gathered at Zhengzhou and started the 4-day academic visit.
After the tight schedules in the visiting journey (click the link to learn more), the training course in this session officially started on the 24th.
Mr. Ma Qingyu, Professor and Doctoral Supervisor from the Chinese Academy of Governance of the Party School of the Central Committee of C.P.C., introduced the implications of collaboration, participation, and common interests and elaborated the trend of the relationship between the government and the communities and new pattern of social governance since the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.
In the new era, social organization is one of the subjects participating in social governance and public service, as well as an important role in the modernization of national governance.
Mr. Dou Ruigang, Executive Secretary General of Tencent Charity Foundation, first raised the question regarding the relationship between public welfare and business, analyzed the future trend and orientation of the public interest sector and the value and foothold for the existence of social organizations, and proposed the unique meaning and value of social organizations in the new era.
He pointed out that “the core of social organizations is charitable organizations” and the path of social organizations with Chinese characteristics should be established in the government’s requirements for transfer of functions. He also cited the saying “Stay hungry, Stay foolish!” from Jobs to illustrate that social organizations should maintain the impetus for growth, integrate resources and mobilize personnel, obtain the value of existence through giving and sharing, and light up the others and improve themselves with love and benevolence.
In the sharing on “maintenance and appreciation of the values of foundations and charitable trust”, Mr. Shangguan Liqing from the Department of Charitable Trust of Chang’an Trust made detailed explanation regarding how charitable organizations should achieve the maintenance and appreciation of asset values and deploy investment and prevent risk. He solved many public interest organizations’ doubts in charitable trust and enabled everyone to have a better understanding of the application of charitable trust.
Mr. Qiu Zhonghui, Director General of Amity Foundation, mentioned that good social organization governance was built on the checks and balances of the internal system. As the core of internal governance, the council should exercise separation of powers with the executive layer in its operation, adopt the democratic mode of group decision making, take the board of supervisors as the internal supervisory mechanism and form effective constraints on power in sequence. The council and secretary general should form good interaction and the council should focus on governance, rather than management.
Mr. Qiu also talked about the mission and responsibility of secretary general: to stick to the mission and vision of the organization, to shoulder the responsibility of the inheritance of the values of the organization, to formulate the development strategy of the organization, to integration internal and external resources of the organization, to forge the ecological environment of the organization, to build open and transparent mechanism, to develop capacity building of the organization, and to cultivate the team of professional talents.
Mr. Chen Xingjia, founder of Shenzhen Henghui Children’s Charity Foundation and Director General of Beijing New Sunshine Charity Foundation, pointed out: the difficulty of innovation in public welfare lies in how to effective integrate social resources and improve the comprehensive efficiency of the society. He proposed “earthworm” perspective and the methodology of alliances and the idea to have social organizations build the soil suitable for the survival of public charity, act proactively in cooperation with the society and obtain support from the government.
With Lian Ai Project as the case, he profoundly interpreted the function of charitable organization in healthy poverty alleviation and how does social organization, as the force from third sector other than the government and market, promote pilot policy innovation and solve social issues through social innovation.
As a former national outstanding secretary of county committee, Mr. Chen resigned from public office and immersed himself in “the second half of his life”, namely the public welfare establishments. As a mutual encouragement, he said something that provoked contemplation: “The society is not perfect and we still love it though we’ve already seen it through. We are still on the move in spite of the difficulties. That is the mission for people with public spirit like us”.
Shen Dongshu, Secretary General of Beijing Leping Social Entrepreneur Foundation, analyzed the new characteristics of the cross-border integration of social innovation in emerging market economics. Cross-border innovation is not only cooperation, but also requires transformation and even hybridization. The cross-border exploration and practice of Leping Social Entrepreneur Foundation indicates that we should not let our thought be constrained by past experience and we should try to break through and accept new things. No matter what the form is, the key is whether it can solve problems.
In spare time, the trainees also visited Source Community Academy, a project under Henan Source Humanistic Commonweal foundation.
With communities as the basic units, Source Community Academy builds the promotion for traditional culture and humanistic education with academy as the form of education and propaganda, creates the social popularization platform close to the public, and promotes the inheritance of traditional Chinese culture and the implementation of humanistic education in real life.
The source also means returning, pointing at incoming path of life and the wisdom of life noumenon and pursing for the ultimate value of life and achieving the overturn and transcendence of the realm of life.
The mission for the training of Lao Niu Academy is to discover talents and cultivate industry leaders for philanthropy in China, improve the “talent ecology” of the industry, and promote the sustainable development of public interest sector. We gained and benefited a lot from the centralized and highly intensive training from Lao Niu Academy. As one of the trainee, I feel deeply honored. Through learning, communicating and sharing with so many colleagues in public welfare, we will become each other’s resources and help each other in their projects, hoping to facilitate more achievement transformation. There is no doubt that it will achieve the original intention of Lao Niu Foundation to cultivate talents.
