Students from No 8 primary school in Huichang county, Jiangxi province, joyfully open their watercolor pen boxes that were packed in the "warm package" donated by nongovernmental organization One Foundation on Tuesday. [Photo by Huang Qingyuan/For chinadaily.com.cn]
The One Foundation, a Chinese nongovernmental charity fund, has recently donated hundreds of "warm packages" to students of a primary school in Huichang county, East China's Jiangxi province.
Such packages, containing winter jackets, socks, shoes, hand cream, schoolbags, color pen sets, drawing books, stickers, airplane chess and dolls, were handed by staff members of the foundation to all the 341 students of Huichang No 8 primary school at a donation ceremony held in the county on Tuesday.
According to Jin Chengkun, Party chief of the school, students of the school mainly come from families in low-rent housing area. Sixty-five percent of the students are left-behind children whose parents work in urban areas while the children live with their grandparents in the rural areas of Huichang.
Also, children from single-parent or divorced families make up 10 percent of the school's total, Jin said.
In cold winter, due to financial constraints, many parents are unable to provide enough choices of warm clothing and shoes for their children, not to mention toys, he added.
Upon learning the situation, the One Foundation contacted the school and prepared warm packages for all the students of the school.
Liu Qianqian, a fourth grade student at the school received the package and said: "I like the coat in the package the most. It makes me feel warm and I hope to bring the warmth to others when I grow up."
The warm package project is a public welfare program established in 2011 to address the living and psychological needs of children in underdeveloped and disaster-affected areas, said Sha Lei, assistant secretary-general of the One Foundation.
As of winter last year, the program had benefited more than 1.03 million children in 1,776 counties, districts, and banners of 29 provinces and regions nationwide and had attracted over 2,000 charity teams and 290,000 volunteers to engage in voluntary services, he said.
In February, the foundation donated and installed 50 water purifiers in 44 schools of Huichang through its clean water project, greatly improving the quality of drinking water for almost 28,000 teachers and students in the county, said Hu Kaiyong, deputy head of Huichang county.
The One Foundation is an independent public fundraising foundation in China, focusing on disaster relief, children's welfare, training of public welfare professionals, and funding grassroots charities.
