Road to Civic Society—Dialogue with Zhai Yan, Executive Director of Beijing Huizeren Human Service Centre
Since volunteer culture and volunteer training mechanism have not taken root in China, the ambition always hits the wall to put all volunteers in the right place. A more reliable model lies in the concept of “civic society” where government indirectly rules the society.
Upon Huizeren online hang three slogans: “Equality for all, and all due respect for diversity”, “Your help for others is for yourself as it digs out another side of you”, “Let your life change that of others”. All these resounding mottos come down to one word—humanism. In this context, “humanism” can be outlined as centring around people based on their mental and occupational needs to improve service efficiency. The biggest discovery of my visit to Huizeren is its human-centred principle.
Zhai Yan，an easy-going volunteer trainer, is the executive director of Huizeren. During the interview her silver tones, clear-cut logics and far-stretched vision gripped me tight inside.
Huizeren has a clear priority task—structuring a complete volunteer training system, or in other words, extending training service of all kind to NPO members and volunteers. Actually, such organisations are rare in China and as far as current statistics show, there are no courses on civic education at any education institution. “Teach yourself before teaching others because no one is expert from the beginning,” Zhai put it this way.
In 2003 when SARS waged the dreadful war against the country, Huizeren was set up against the tide. Unlike its NPO counterparts, Huizeren did not hassle with directly confronting the disease. Instead, it adhered to its own judgement—volunteer training and research into NPO mechanism in China.
Despite ups and downs and pressure from all aspects, Huizeren has worked out a seamless system of training courses composed of three layers—“volunteer service concept and basic skills” for volunteers, “volunteer administration and project management” for mid-level managers and “leadership and organisation administration” for top brass. These three courses are so intertwined that they wield separate cells within the organisation into an organic circle. For example, managers that attend volunteer administration courses may affect and teach their volunteer staff (There are over 200 professional volunteer trainers, most of them from colleges and NPOs).
Huizeren has positioned three core services—training, mechanism construction, research and publicity. Guided by such orientations, Huizeren is now clearer about what it is supposed to do at crisis. The best evidence is the recent Wenchuan Earthquake when Huizeren did not rush to forefront but directed its attention to what capabilities were needed in the rescue as well as reconstruction process. By doing that, they insisted, different NPOs could appear where they were most needed. “Currently few organisations can remain sober and independent to supervise the rescue and put forth valuable proposals. They don’t know what their role really is,” said Zhai.
Usually on heels of a catastrophe, a spate of new NPOs would spring up, vying to have place in history. However, as Zhai criticised, everything is twofold. When disasters fall, civic consciousness may be evoked in some people, urging them to voluntarily scrape up an NPO-like rescue team, which is by all measures praiseworthy. But such makeshift gatherings would not sustain. The real sustainable model should be tolerant in the first place, acknowledging the existence of other organisations such as those serving the disadvantaged, the marginalized, AIDS carriers, the homosexual, the disabled and the divorced. Without the diversity of volunteer service, citizens are deprived of rights to choose. And this diversity means everything to Huizeren, a training body built on NPO eco-circle: the more NPOs, the more clients. In this sense, the quake crisis is nonetheless a chance for Huizeren.
But the overheated NPO fever is not immune to side effects. The bubble will be pricked once the fever cools down. Therefore, constant passion, rather than fever, determines the lifespan of an NPO. “That’s what Huizeren is obliged to do—studying varieties of cases and then summing up an empirical guideline for all NPOs,” said Zhai with excitement. As she introduced, rescue work is a grinding test of physical and mental strength. At the time of mental disturbance, men tend to blow it up while women would rather keep silent. As most NPOs are struggling to help others, Huizeren is thinking about how to help them.
Since volunteer culture and volunteer training mechanism have not taken root in China, the ambition always hits the wall to put all volunteers in the right place. A more reliable model lies in the concept of “civic society” where government indirectly rules the society. In this society, enterprises are the first option; they roll out products based on market rules. People that cannot afford market products could appeal to non-profit organisations. Government only plays a coordinator role between profit and non-profit sectors by issuing policies and organising procurement.
If we compare Huizeren to an enterprise in the profit sector, it provides raw materials for the consumer product suppliers (in this analogy NPOs). Its performance is heavyweight to both NPOs and the public. It is the “hero behind the scene”.
The hero now has its long-term plan—three-year “Western V” projects and a five-year inter-provincial project. “Western V” projects, renewed every three years, are aimed at helping citizens in poor areas, especially West China, set up their own NPOs. The inter-provincial project, with duration of five years, is launched to back programmes of training poverty-relieving volunteers across five provinces.
It was nearly six o’clock at the close of the interview. Yet Zhai Yan, given no time to think of supper, had to hurry on to a conference discussing Huizeren’s training service in the 2008 Olympic Games. She’s always been on the run. As she put it in her essay Doing NPO with Faith, “it is our faith or value judgement that decides who we are, and ignites our sense of commitment.”
Why doing NPO? Nothing but driven by faith!
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