Summer Archives

Bingran Zeng Beijing, China - JUMP! Foundation

Empowering Migrant Youth in Urban China

Bingran Zeng, JUMP! Foundation

Growing up in Shenzhen, China, one of the cities with the biggest population of migrant workers, I met many friends from around the country who moved to the city with their parents for better education and quality of life. As we moved on to pursue different paths, I had the privilege to enter excellent public school while some of my friends gradually dropped out of middle school or high schools to pursue vocational training or work opportunities. It was not until my college year when I realized that my friends did not quit schools by choice, but because the population control policy in China deprived them of the right to education. The more I studied the issue of migrant youth in urban China, the more I felt personally connected to it. Therefore, I decided to return to JUMP! Foundation to implement a project to empower migrant youth in Beijing.

During my initial communication with JUMP! Development Manager, Irene, in last spring, we agreed that providing teacher trainings to migrant schools would be the most sustainable way to reach the largest number of students in the city. Therefore, I designed my project around collaborating with local universities and nonprofits to support novice teachers in Beijing migrant schools. After communicating with multiple nonprofit partners and university professors, nevertheless, I learned that their previous experience of collaborating with migrant school teachers were not successful because teachers had little incentives to put in the effort to develop themselves professionally. Irene and I eventually decided to focus on collaborating with one organization, Love & Hope Vocational School, to provide a leadership program for migrant youths directly.

Love & Hope Vocational School (L&H) is a not-for-profit boarding school that provides both academic and vocational courses to students in the age between 14 and 19. Students at L&H are mainly migrant youth or left-behind youth whose parents are working in Chinese cities. Communication with Ms. Kim, the headmistress of L&H, showed us that students at L&H seldom have the chance of enrichment learning experience, and their day to day lives are largely confined to the campus that they live in. Consequently, students have very little sense of agency and they often attribute the challenges they experience to external factors, such as low family income, lack of family involvement, low quality education, etc. Therefore, both JUMP! and L&H agree that providing a leadership program would be the most effective way to empower students at L&H to recognize that they can change in their community.

And I am happy to report that the leadership program for L&H is ready to be implemented in September 2017. 30 participants will attend 2-day workshops on design thinking and conducting needs assessment. After that, they will conduct needs assessment in their school community to discover problems that they would like to address. The program will culminate in a two-day leadership conference, where each team will come together to design a Community Impact Project that specifically addresses the problem they discovered and present their project to a panel of judges. Finally, the panel will select two panels to receive seed fund from JUMP! to implement their projects.

In short, I am grateful for the opportunity to work with passionate colleagues at JUMP! and L&H to empower migrant youth in Beijing, and I look forward to learning about the Community Impact Projects that our participants will implement to create changes in their community.