Bolo: Love-idea=Love for Idea + Idea of Love
In the early spring of the year 2008, a seed of love sprouted in Beijing. Love-idea, a small charity organization gathered by a group of life-loving idea creators, is now opening its arms to a grand wish:
Positioned as a special charity channel, Love-idea is poised to turn the ideas of urban residents into eye-catchy products via rural workforce. Those products are then sold to small markets of cities with the earnings returning to the rural areas. With that, a small chain of idea industry (city-country-city) is forged out.
At the first meet with Bolo, founder of Love-idea, she was participating in a documentary salon. She was short-haired and dressed in a black blouse. The silk scarf glittered around her white smooth neck, splashing a stylish smell, and highlighting a brisk and bright profile. But an in-depth conversation led me to her thoughtful side. It is, perhaps, her ambivalence of characters that gifted her with the power to combine love and ideas.
Attracted by her delicate shell eardrops, I asked her if she had any experience in art design, or interest in traditional folklore. To my great surprise, she had never learned or worked in art industry; but her initiative for the NOP cause came partially out of her affinity for the traditional folklore. The model of Love-idea is, in a strict sense, an idea, which was inspired during a visit (which was launched by “Heavy Backpack”, a volunteer organization) to Shuoyang of Guangxi Province in May, 2007. Bolo, being a member of the visit, witnessed a heart-breaking scene:
A woman in fifties was quietly sitting in a gloomy room, sewing an Indian sari glimmering in the dark. But beyond her knowledge was that the sari that took weeks to finish but yielded only 20 RMB was tagged with an exorbitant price in the market as a handicraft. The majority of the value was snatched by agents-in-between.
Stirred up by the obvious exploitations, Bolo established Love-idea with a view to helping those impoverished rural laborers. For them, there was no end in sight for a higher income. So Bolo was determined to save the extra rural workforce from being a money spinner.
Layman as she is in idea creation, Bolo has many friends in art industry. They can afford the time and energy to create something new. And more importantly, they have the aspiration to seek for a way directly out of life to spread their love, which is above anything else to be an idea-creator of love.
“We have a teammate nicknamed ‘fan of fun’ who makes lamps from used zips. That’s a lot of fun and provides not only fine works but also an environment-friendly notion,” said Bolo with a balmy smile. “Of course, love crosses over borders,” she highlights, “I hope more people (not just designers) could take care of things around them.” Self-improvement and helping others are not restricted to art industry; the idea-creation of artifacts is nothing but a form of charity. “For example, we once sold the poems collected in the idea bazaar as a means to fund charity,” explained Bolo. From her illustrations, what Love-idea tries to deliver seems to be the concept that even those who know nothing about design could feed back to the society with ideas.
“What is charity? Can we count what generates value for the society as a charity in the broad sense?” Bolo, with a deeper understanding of charity, sticks to her own definition. In her mind, charity implies far more than the name itself, or any form of it; it concerns substantive elements such as love, responsibility and social value. “Take a business for example,” she added, “what seems to only benefit itself virtually benefits the society. So businesses can be broadly defined as charity.” Those narrowly-defined NGOs have shouldered their commitments but may have followed a wrong route. Therefore what Love-idea can and will do is only “do something and do it as well as possible, however insignificant it may be.” Besides, according to Bolo, it is better to put ourselves in an equal status with those we help than to override them.
Love-idea organized an activity named “Face-to-face with Ethnic Yi” in mid-April, which was aimed at providing an interactive platform for Ethnic Yi and urban citizens interested in ethnic handicrafts to communicate and socialize. And hopefully some opportunities of development may be available to the people of Ethnici Yi. Apart from that, the website of Love-idea is being constructed. The wiki-model network platform will be used to deliver missions of love, which ranges from a design of a recycle bag to a proposal for folklore preservation.
Creating ideas with love, the practice advocated by Love-idea, is more of a life philosophy. It could splatter in all walks of urban life, filling our life with love and fun, and passing the warmth to our rural people. For love and idea shall never rest in peace.
HaoBing: Development of People as the Core
Development of People as the Core
–An Interview to Ms Hao Bing, Chief Director of Brooks Education Institute (BEI)
- For an NPO, people are the priority with their development as the core. The question poses a great challenge as to how to develop people and get them back to serve the society.
- Every newly-born upstart holds a dream that it yearns to express. And it has already sailed off. So you can see its shape
“He who knows the male yet cleaves to what is female. Becomes like a ravine, receiving all things under heaven.”– Lao Tzu
Ravine is naturally associated with the river running through it; in ancient Chinese, though, ravine is rhetorically extended to brooks, where the water is clear and slow. In the doctrine of Taoism, water, together with ravine, is an icon of peace, forgivingness and eternity. And that is why the word “brooks” is selected as the name of the organization.
“Like a mother, we breed life with love; like water, we benefit the world without scrambling with it,” writes Ms Hao in the preface of BEI’s 2007 yearbook, which is, with no doubt, the best interpretation to the philosophy of Ms Hao, and BEI, an organization born amid the rampage of SARS.
She was chatting with two students around the food chain and ecological balance the first time I met her. Her remarks, so wise and witty, captured me with no alert. So much so that the moment I was supposed to raise my questions, I was still absorbed in her assertion: “The mankind is breeding the most scaring enemies like cockroaches with growing fertility and immunity to pesticide.”
Development of People as the Core
BEI is dedicated to three fields—rural education, nature education and citizen education—along with eight programs named as Rural Education Textbooks, Rural Libraries, Mankind and Grassland, and Global Forum, to list a few. Given so broad a range of fields and so deep a line of programs to handle, a sufficient number of volunteers have to be guaranteed. Equally important is the development of these volunteers.
“Strictly speaking, BEI is not a volunteer organization. It’s composed of a roughly stable structure of all-time and part-time staff, with duties to be pulled off by these people. However, we attach great importance to the development of the team as well as the individuals in it,” said Ms Hao, “For an NPO, people are the priority with their development as the core. The question poses a great challenge as to how to develop people and get them back to serve the society. BEI is trying to build on a culture of development in the hope of assuring development of all people and the programs they serve.”
Small Upstart Organizations as Infants
As a mature NPO, BEI is expected to set an example to those small upstart organizations troubled in feeble growth. As to this viewpoint, however, Ms Hao showed some disagreement. “Every newly-born upstart holds a dream that it yearns to express. And it has already sailed off. So you can see its shape,” she argued, “but it’s just like an infant who needs breeding and caring. It’s like us, with its own cycle of life. So don’t lay too much load on it. Don’t constrict it to a normalized framework by the standard of a mature organization, picking at its lack of professionalism in operation or finance, whatever…. Instead, a caring protection should be given to it at different stages of development to release unnecessary shackles.”
BEI as an Incubator for NPOs
When talking about the development of the team, Ms Hao slipped off surprising news that BEI is encouraging its staff to set up new organizations based on their own development and program resources. As to the reason she explained: “There’s nothing to worry about. I believe BEI is only a meaningless mark while the meaning lies in its people. Without these people, BEI has no room to stand. These people, wherever they are working, be it BEI or any other organization, carry on and out the ideas shaped in BEI, which, in turn, directs us to better fulfill the rest of the programs. What’s more, in a society still hungry for NGOs, more such organizations are called for. ”
Finally, when asked to predict the future of BEI, Ms Hao responded briefly: “Let it be!”
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
