Community Service

Community Service >> Korea Kent Foreign School Volunteer Club

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Community Service >> Global Issues Network

The education of girls and women has, in recent years, received a lot of attention as a way forward for many problems in our world. At the American International School of Guangzhou this awareness has resulted in the creation of a wildly successful scholarship program to support young women in our area.

Soon after I joined the faculty of AISG I was invited to help support a project that sponsors sixty local Chinese girls to complete their high school education in a highly ranked boarding school. I spent the better part of a weekend traveling with a group of about a dozen committed students from our Global Issues Network (GIN), to the small town of Ren Hua in the Shao Guan area of Southern China. My role, as it was explained to me, was to be a faculty chaperone and help support the relationship building between our students and the young women that attended the school we would be visiting. Actually, I did pretty much nothing. I stood back and watched as the GIN members facilitated a program that included things like games, English learning, visits to senior care homes, singing, and friendship. The students had also organized guest speakers, including young women who had been in the scholarship program and were now studying at university. In the end, the teachers really just watched and did the curfew calls back at the hotel in the evening.

Through the support of GIN and the Concordia Welfare Education Foundation (CWF), all sixty students have been successfully staying in school with the majority exceling in their studies. I caught up with this year’s president of GIN, So Yun Chang, to ask about the overwhelming success of the program. “Everything GIN does,” said Chang, ‘is supported by the school community and I’m very grateful for that. That’s purely shown in the statistics too: the majority of the donors are school faculty. Everyone in the community has been just so welcoming to the new events GIN has facilitated for the past two years, like Trivia Night or the Guangzhou visit (when the students come to AISG for three days of learning and touring universities here).”

Asked about why so many students have shown such a high level of commitment to this project Chang pointed to the fact that it is student driven: “I firmly believe that everyone in the group is there because they want to dedicate their time and passion to serving these Shao Guan girls. Members at GIN aren’t spending one and a half hours every Friday afternoon in Mr Little’s room just so they have something to put on their college application. Everyone understands the effect ‘Bridging Hearts Through Education’ program has had on the Shao Guan girls, and everyone has a clear, respectable incentive to be part of GIN.”

The club’s faculty sponsor, Eric Little, says he agrees that this is an exceptionally student-driven project and attributes this to a number of factors. Little believes that students in past years were also motivated by attendance at GIN conferences that highlighted the issues of girl’s education and child labor. One of the students even received the prestigious EARCOS award as a result of the commitment she had poured into this project. Little also noted that the older students in the group make a concerted effort to mentor the freshmen students in the group. Looking at the members of this GIN group, I can only agree when Eric Little smiles broadly and says “You can’t believe what students can do if you just let them!”