Project Hope is currently involved with sponsoring children from an elementary school in remote Wanhe, an impoverished rural village in a mountainous region of Gansu Province.
We collaborate with a Gansu official, Mrs. Jiaping Wang, who provides us with a list of the children who are deemed in-need. These children come from households with single parents, sick parents, parents who have lost their jobs, or even their lives. While the Chinese government guarantees that education will be freely provided to these children, they still must buy their own books and supplies for school, which is an extreme burden on their families given their distressful financial situations.
It is here that Project Hope at Cornell makes a difference. As stated in our constitution: Every penny donated to us goes towards funding the education of these children, with no overhead. Mrs. Wang has identified 46 children in-need. Currently we have committed to sponsoring 26 of them with our available funds. Because our resources are finite, we have the following priorities:
- We commit to helping children finish their primary education. This means we will fund the education of the older children first, then younger children as funds become availiable
- If we fund a child, we will continue to fund him or her to the completion of their education. Thus we will only commit to sponsoring children if our resources allow
- Because giving the gift of education is of paramount importance, we will always fund students first, and only if resources permit, will we do additional things like library building and school renovations
We recognize that members of the Cornell community have entrusted us with their hard earned money in donating to us. In return, Cornell Project Hope demands accountability from those whom we sponsor by:
- Requiring the name and family situation of every child we sponsor
- Requiring that yearly progress reports are given to us about how the money we donated was used
- Requiring yearly correspondence letters from the children we sponsor
Items From Our Work in Gansu
©2008