By Beate Engelen
When my husband and I first became involved with Amity as teachers in a small college in Shandong four years ago, we found that many of our students were interested in some kind of voluntary work. They wanted to do something for elderly people, disabled children or the environment. What really impressed them [...]

By Li Xue
“Sir, can you tell me why these people do not allow a stranger into their homes to warm his hands? Look at the bright windows. Their fires must be huge.”
The bus is rumbling up. I hastily withdraw my hand from his and shout: “It’s because these people are more civilized than the mountain [...]

by Li Xue
Replanting a potted plant is a long and tedious process. In his book, “Mirror of Flowers”, the 17th century horticulturist Chen Haozi recorded minutely what it takes to do it right: choosing the right environment, pruning, replacing the soil and watering the plant. Only if the replanting process is done with the utmost [...]

Amity’s Home of Blessings has opened a bakery as a vocational training institution for developmentally disabled people. Giving them an opportunity to work in a real-life workplace has improved the lives of people with Down syndrome – and those of their customers. By Xin Yisheng
30-year-old Zhou Jian from Nanjing has just mastered the first vocational [...]

An Amity volunteer dares to look at social reality a world apart from her own comfortable city life. By Wang Ying
At the end of December last year, I took part in an activity organized by the Amity Foundation. We went on a field trip to interview orphans who live in northern Jiangsu, not far from [...]

By Zhong Xin
A big challenge for China’s nonprofit organizations (NPOs) today is how to deal with their lack of funding. There are three different main sources of their income: government subsidies, membership fees and public donations. A nationwide survey on NPOs compiled by Tsinghua University in 1998 found that only 2.2% of their financing comes [...]

Traveling to Inner Mongolia in April 2008, Beate Engelen visited an independent farmers’ association.
What is so special about the “Potato Association” in the Inner Mongolian county of Wulate Middle Banner? Farmers in this area usually sell their potatoes to a factory through a middleman who arranges everything related to the business transactions between the farmers [...]

By Beate Engelen
For a week, Gong Sheng, Yue Yaomeng and I explored the daily life of the Yi people in Butuo, a mountainous, high-altitude county of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Region. Down in the lowlands of Liangshan at the shores of Lake Qionghai, the air and the scenery felt like Italy. But up here, in the [...]

By Gong Sheng
The land around here is barren. For many generations, the Yi people of Butuo County have been working hard to turn this patch of Southern Sichuan into a more beautiful place. The mountains are towering high. For several thousand years, the Yi have been toiling to cultivate this wasteland. However, poverty seems to [...]

A Girl from the Yi Minority Might Get a New Home – But Not a Family. By Beate Engelen
The photo of a big-eyed girl captures my attention when Ajia Rebu, a local official in charge of orphans in Butuo county, hands us some files as we are sitting in the back seat of the car. [...]