“My company got involved (with Sun Village) years ago but we’ve started to feel more and more uncomfortable (about its management) in recent years,” said a Beijing-based communications director for a multinational corporation who did not want to beidentified. “We’ve usually helped by donating food for the children … but recently we’vecontinually received calls asking the cash donations, without any explanation of how themoney will be used.”
However, the school’s director argues that her critics do not understand how hard it is to run a charity in China.
“Why do (the people criticizing me) not recognize the hardship I’ve been through?”
said Zhang, a fast-talking woman who has also been accused of being too aggressive. “I don’t think they have any right to say anything about me or Sun Village.
“We cannot get (affiliated), so why do (donors) think I should publicize our financial records?” she added, before offering to show China Daily the charity’s accounts. “The privacy of the convicts’ children is the only reason why I am reluctant to make my financial report transparent to the public. Issues related to people in jail is very sensitive in China and I don’t want the children to be hurt to any extent.”
Most charities do not offer detailed information about donations and spending unless donors specifically ask to see some, say analysts. The Beijing communications director admitted her company had never formally requested any financial reports from Sun Village.
Regularly publishing accounts can actually be a heavy financial burden for charity minnows.
Dandelion School, a charitable education project targeting the children of migrant workers in Beijing, is consistently praised for its transparency. Yet due to the extra cost of distributing its accounts, the group can only keep donors updated on the specific projects they contribute to.
“That costs less than posting the whole package, such as how the money was spent and what kind of effects it has had,” said Clare Pearson, chief editor of Charitarian, the only English-language philanthropy magazine published in China.
The accounting can also be complicated by the fact charitable NGOs also rely on donations to cover running costs. This can be difficult to break down for people not working in the charity sector, explained Deng.
“The public in China isn’t really familiar with how NGOs are managed and often don’t recognize that the costs of running a charity - people’s wages, transport, etc - often comes from donations,” said the professor. He estimated that, depending on the size of the charity, about 5 to 20 percent of the money raised goes towards administrative costs.
However, grassroots NGOs often do not allocate enough funds towards itsmanagement, which can also contribute to the slow disclosure of information to donors,said Li Dajun, program manager for the China Social Research Center affiliated withPeking University.
“They are so busy looking for fund-raising opportunities (to support their cause) thatthey leave little room for their own development as a charity,” said Li, who worked withseveral NGOs between 2003 and 2007.
“Ultimately, if trust is built (between a charity and its donors), few will doubt how themoney is spent,” added Pearson, who is also a corporate social responsibility manager forthe international law firm DLA Piper.
Selection process
Carefully selecting a charity that is run by professionals is key to ensuring anydonation will be spent correctly and efficiently.
“Sometimes, when people decide to find a charity to support, their eyes are alwayscaught by the famous or popular ones, although neither of these qualities guarantee professionalism or qualifications,” said Deng at Tsinghua University.
As the charity sector continues to develop, so too does the experience of those working in it. However, the current demand for human resources at NGOs far outweighs supply.
“The first generation of China’s NGO founders knows less about managing charities, so they have stuck to the tradition of being family run and giving relatives jobs in the organization,which creates more suspicion,” said a publicity expert who has studied the development of NGOs in China for more than a decade ago but did not want to be identified.
Sun Village is one of those organizations that have been accused of being “family run” and media reports claimed Zhang employs two daughters and a son-in-law to manage the school.
However, the under-fire director fiercely rejected the allegation, saying: “I have hired professional personnel to work at the village.”
To increase the level of trust in charities, many experts argue they should be made independent of government departments.
“Charity should be independent from authority, while transparency should be realized through social supervision, not regulations,” said Deng, who added that many of the problems charitable NGOs face are caused by the complex registration process.
“The easiest way (to boost the sector and ensure transparency) is to allow more room for these organizations to register. Only by doing this can more charities get the chance to impact society.”
May 27,2010
Nuclear reaction to tourist attraction
The forgotten scientists who ran one of China’s largest Cold War-era projects.
Peng Yining reports from Chongqing
When Baitao was chosen as the site for a top-secret nuclear base in 1966, authorities literally wiped it from the map.
Over the following two decades, more than 60,000 soldiers and scientists were sent to this remote town hidden in the mountains east of Chongqing to work on one of the largest Cold War-era projects.
The project resulted in the construction of the world’s largest man-made cave -104,000 square meters, the equivalent of 20 football fields - but the military base was scrapped in 1982 before it was ever finished.