In case you haven’t noticed the world isn’t well. Wealth gap, poverty, mental illness, environmental degradation, illiteracy are huge problems--just in China. Around the world, the picture looks even worse when you throw in monumental natural disasters, massive climate change and world governments which are clearly totally incapable of doing anything about anything except bailing out big banks. But expats in Shanghai are doing something about these problems in areas like Education, Health, the Environment, and Relief Work. Read on to see how people are pitching in and see how you too can get involved. As little as an hour a week can make a difference.

EDUCATION

“Good morning Ben! Good morning Lucy!” The fifth graders chanted in unison. They sat two to a desk, 34 in the tiny classroom in a school in Minhang, reading from a handout. They’re children of migrant workers from all over China. Most of them have never had an English lesson from a foreigner.

“Very good! But that doesn’t sound very natural,” said the teacher Laura Mitchelson, a volunteer with Stepping Stones (Tel: 3209-556), a group that organizes expats to teach English at migrant schools in Shanghai. “Do people talk like this?” Mitchelson continued, mimicking the children’s robotic tone of voice.

The kids giggled and shouted, “No!”

“Let’s try again then,” said Mitchelson.

For the past four years, SS has brought volunteers to teach at this migrant school once a week for an hour. It’s a relaxed and friendly group. Some teach alone and others partner up. The kids are drawn to the teachers like magnets, if only because of the novelty of having a foreigner at the blackboard.

“It’s about getting them enthusiastic to learn, and one can do that by being enthusiastic,” said Mitchelson, who’s lived in Shanghai for 12 years. “My spirits are higher when I leave than when I come in.”

Migrant children are often most disadvantaged in their opportunities to learn English. “There’s a gaping need for better English teaching at migrant schools, and foreigners can give very easily,” said Corinne Hua, who founded the organization that sees a rotating register of 250 volunteers every week. She’s now looking for volunteers to staff the organization’s summer schools.

How You Can Get Involved
Shanghai Young Bakers (Tel: 138-1793-0875) sends Chinese orphans to France for training to work as bakers at international hotels and cafés when they return to Shanghai. They need volunteers to help with their website, attract more corporate sponsors and teach English and French. Volunteers with Shanghai Sunrise (Tel: 136-8161-7871) sends underprivileged children to school by recruiting donors and partners and organizing fundraisers. The Library Project (Tel: 159-2955-6183) works with volunteers to organize Chinese-language book drives and corporate sponsors to build libraries in rural schools. Volunteers can travel to the schools to help open the libraries.

The Environment

Twenty-three-year-old Heather Wigmore, an American who grew up in Singapore, has spent a month planting trees in Inner Mongolia for the past two years. This morning, Wigmore led a team of 60 Roots and Shoots (Tel: 6352-3580) volunteers on bus and horse cart to a patch of poplars planted a few years ago. At the site, a staff member gave a lesson on pruning, then the volunteers fanned out to give it a try.

This area used to be grasslands, but they degraded long ago with over-grazing and over-farming. Now completely barren, the landscape is sandy and brown–lifeless but for rows and rows of poplars, planted by Wigmore’s team and the local government. The R&S group that first arrived in the area in 2007 was stunned by the desertification. A tractor had to go down half a meter to find wet soil. Today, Wigmore can see major changes. And she hopes to bring life back to the soil by leading volunteers to plant one million trees here by 2014.

R&S has been around for a decade in Shanghai. As the only foreign affiliated environmental non-profit that has legal registration in China, it enjoys privileged status and the cooperation of local governments. It kicked off the Million Tree Project in 2007. Staff and volunteers planted 10,000 trees in the program’s first year, and more than 200,000 already this year. Throughout the year, the organization’s volunteers raise money and awareness with events. Then, every April, more than 200 participants of all ages and backgrounds make the trip to Inner Mongolia in overlapping shifts to plant the trees with local farmers.

“It’s pretty fun, being outside pruning trees,” said Anthony Li, a junior at Shanghai American School in Puxi. He and his classmates raised enough money to buy 1,000 trees (each tree costs ¥25). “We got our school to ‘carbon-neutralize’ all the flights, and we had fundraising events like selling solar powered iPod chargers.”

“Most kids grow up in cities and never do anything like this,” said Wigmore. “When they get here and see the land with their own eyes, it’s really an experience. They say they’re really touched by how devastated the land is, and they feel empowered to improve the environment.” The group will travel to a new site and plant thousands of saplings on Sunday. On Monday, they will go to a local school and give a class an English lesson on the environment, hoping to pass the legacy on.

How You Can Get Involved
Greennovate (Tel: 3229-0343), a consulting company that helps companies be more green, also runs environmental educational programs for high schoolers and university students. The organization trains university student volunteers to visit rural schools and teach youths about the green issues and how to resolve them. Expats or non-students who are interested in similar volunteer opportunities can email tammy.ku@gmail.com from BEAN. Monthly meet-up Green Drinks Shanghai (Tel: 5466-6969) gets its volunteers to help recruit members and sponsors for its lectures and networking events.

Relief Work

The afternoon sun slants across the Xinhua Block community center’s indoor basketball court, illuminating a volunteer shooting hoops with three mentally disabled men. On the far end of the court, a group is playing volleyball and in the next room, ping-pong.

On the last Wednesday of every month, 20 members of the Sunshine Home for the mentally disabled meet the volunteers from Hands On Shanghai (Tel: 6225-5220) at the gym. They attend classes at the Sunshine Home every day from 8:30am to 3pm, and by now they’re used to seeing the volunteers. Started by young expats in 2004, HOS organizes a variety of weekly events around visits to area hospitals, nursery homes and Sunshine. There, volunteers have put together a series of PowerPoint presentations that introduce the kids to different sports like golf and bowling every week. One Saturday last month, they also organized a tour bus to take the kids to Century Park.

“They have a purpose, and they’re organized. The kids start recognizing the individual volunteers after a few visits,” said one teacher.

“I think this does me more good than them, actually,” said Henry Hwong, a California transplant and Web start-up entrepreneur. “It gets me away from the chaos of starting a business.” Hwong found HOS online, and said that the organization makes it easy to fit sessions into his schedule because it lets volunteers register for individual events online. Just then, a coordinator handed Hwong a multi-colored clown costume. “They think this will amuse the kids,” he said, laughing.

How You Can Get Involved
BEAN organizes one-off volunteer events supporting other charities which anyone can join by signing up online. Volunteers can visit orphanages, the homes of disabled residents and hospital patients, clean up beaches and teach at migrant schools. Habitat for Humanity (Tel: 5857-5879) builds homes all over China and is currently putting together one-day projects in Shanghai this summer. Volunteers for Home Sweet Home (Tel: 6136-9196) work to provide housing and jobs for homeless and disabled people. Morning Tears volunteers organize food, shelter and clothing, and provide counseling and education for children whose parents are incarcerated. Rotaract (Tel: 159-2122-3663) has weekly trips to a Suzhou orphanage, fundraisers for various projects such as DPRK Hospital and Women's Health Center and is planning clean-up days.

Health

On the fifth floor of the Shanghai Chest Hospital is a small room, no more than 20 sqm meters, down the corridor from the children’s heart ward. One large blue table sits in the center, stacked full of donated toys. Five little patients who just woke from their afternoon naps and five sets of parents and grandparents are playing with jigsaw puzzles, dolls and toy cars.

Three expat women from Heart to Heart (Tel: 139-0188-8313)are there too, getting more toys out of the closet and cooing at the sleepy toddlers. One of them is the organization’s founder, Christine Cullen. An Australian who’s lived in Shanghai for 14 years, Cullen is tall, bubbly and emits a warm glow of energy.

Seven years ago, Cullen was told that there were children in the heart ward who had nowhere to play, so she gathered volunteers and created a playroom with donated furniture and toys. Then they discovered that many of the kids who required open heart surgery were from poor areas or provinces and could not afford it. So H2H began raising money to foot the bills. At ¥25,000 per surgery, H2H has already sponsored 311 kids. Volunteers can visit any day of the week to see the kids and support their families at the two hospitals where H2H operate, as well as help with the distribution of donated clothes and fund raising.

The grandparents of a 4-year-old girl with short hair in a red, white and blue checkered jacket came over to chat with Cullen and the doctor, who had just dropped in.

“We feel very, very good, very moved,” said Zhao Yunming, the grandfather. He was tearing up. “She used to get sick every two to three days.”

“The little girl had congenital heart disease and frequent respiratory infections,” Dr. Chen Qun explained. “But the operation a week ago was very successful, and in a week, she’ll be able to go home.”

“If kids like her don’t have surgery, the schools won’t accept them, they can’t get work in a factory and girls can’t find husbands,” said Cullen. She and volunteers will go out to Anhui to visit the girl in her home in a few months. “When I see this kind of change, sometimes I think this is why I was sent to China.”

How You Can Get Involved
Baobei Foundation (Tel: 159-0097-2846) volunteers raise funds and take care of orphan babies who need neurological and gasto-intestinal surgery. LifeLine Shanghai (Tel: 6279-8990) trains volunteer counselors to man helplines for expats who need anything from a medical referral to a sympathetic ear. Wheelchair Foundation (Tel: 6380-4427) volunteers raise awareness for disabled people and donate 100,000 wheelchairs to individuals around the world every year. Chi Heng Foundation volunteers discuss HIV and AIDS with local communities and raise funds for scholarship programs for Chinese AIDS orphans.

By Jean Yung