15th Anniversary!

It was 15 years ago that the first group of 50 students began to spend their days in the classroom rather than in the fields helping their family in desperately poor, landlocked Guizhou Province.

Gwen Moore had learned that a consequence of profound poverty is that many children were not able to go to school. About this she said, "This I can help to fix."

Some of the students helped over the years have completed elementary school, high school, and college. One girl in particular now works in a textile factory along China's southern coast and makes enough money to help her parents and her brother, who is in college.

"I never could have dared dream that today, 15 years later, the Gwen Moore Children of China Fund would be making an enduring promise to educate poor, rural children in China," Moore reflects.

The Power of One

In 1995, one New York Times reporter wrote a story that described life in a remote, rural county in China where people still live like generations before them have lived.* They make their living from the harsh and unforgiving land, are burdened by a legacy of poverty and illiteracy, and have few prospects for the future different from the past.

Halfway around the world, one woman read the story—and was moved to act. Today, the Gwen Moore Children of China Fund helps support education for poor, rural children in the county the story portrayed.

The Gwen Moore Children of China Fund demonstrates the Power of One: how one individual, moved to make the world a better place, can do so—one life at a time.

To Change the Future

These four Chinese characters mean "to change the future." That is what the Gwen Moore Children of China Fund aims to do for hundreds of poor, rural children in the remote Luodian County of landlocked Guizhou Province in southwestern China.

Education is a key that can change the future in ways Luodian County residents never imagined—enhancing the quality of their lives, supporting their families, and changing their personal and social circumstances.

Most children in Luodian County are born into dire and persistent poverty. By providing children with access to education, the Fund helps to break this cycle.

Click here for a short primer on pronouncing Chinese words.