We'll be participating in an upcoming conference in Beijing this October. While the original plan was to host a large number of NGOs, we may in fact be focusing on a student population this time around. Despite these changes, however, we still see a wonderful opportunity to promote the Chao Foundation mission of promoting a spirit of philanthropy. Having this chance to interact with youth, run them through a poverty simulation, and then talk to them about ways they can help will be tremendously valuable in spreading a service ethic in China's younger generation. Hopefully we will leave them excited enough to help identify potential grassroots organizations or other candidates like children with Congenital Heart Disease who can benefit from our foundation's services. In the meantime, we're trying to put as much marketing collateral together as possible in time for the event. We're still playing around a lot with design, but here's a sneak peek of the front one of our potential handouts (the back will have more specific information on how to join the effort)!

The Haas Center’s Fellowship in Philanthropy provides Stanford students with full-time placements in various Bay Area foundations to develop their understanding of and interests in philanthropy. Steve Ko, one of the fellows and a recent graduate at Stanford, has been with us since the beginning of the summer. He has been learning a great deal about the Chao Foundation, and has been working on a project to revamp East Villager’s Internship Program for the upcoming year.

One of the required components of the fellowship is a site visit, which allows the fellows to visit one another’s placement sites and gain a diverse perspective on foundations. It was our turn to host the fellows a couple of weeks ago, so all of the fellows were invited into our Palo Alto office. Steve prepared a presentation introducing the Chao Foundation, and the fellows got to hear Mr. and Mrs. Chao and Nancy share their stories on how they got involved in philanthropy. It was a time of meaningful exchange for both the staff and the students!

One of our 2011 affiliates, Josh To of WellDone.org introduced us to The School Fund's idea several months ago. We checked them out and loved the easy-to-use interface, the person-to-person component and also the emphasis on transparency in nonprofit donations. Based on that, we reached out to one of the founders, Matt Severson, and were able to talk about potential partnerships face to face when he returned to the Bay Area a few weeks ago. 
Tonight, we were tremendously excited to sit down with Matt again, this time with co-founder Roxana Moussavian, to talk about things more concretely. There are some exciting things brewing between us and we can't wait to formally announce things once they happen!

In the meantime, we encourage you to learn more about The School Fund and their mission. They are currently focused on funding scholarships for African schoolchildren (with an excellent breakdown of scholarship costs, and a full description of the accountability process so donors know exactly how their money will be spent and distributed). We feel their platform could be a great window to the West for underfunded causes related to Asian youth as well and are working to make that happen. Hopefully we'll have updates shortly on how that might happen!

Our staff in Beijing had the pleasure of hosting two Stanford undergraduate students in the office today! Alice and Emily (center) are working on a documentary about NGO culture in China and were interested in learning more about the foundation. They interviewed our team about what motivated them to join the nonprofit sector, our biggest accomplishments, differences between NGOs in U.S. and China, and much more. We were honored to have met them and can't wait to see the finished product of their hard work!