The Evolution of the Fund

"I wasn’t looking for a philanthropic opportunity," says Gwen Moore, the founder of the Children of China Fund. She continues:

"I was just reading a New York Times story about economic development in China on a cold December day in 1995. The story described how the tremendous economic advances of China’s coastal cities were nowhere to be seen in her vast rural heartland, where three-quarters of China’s 1.3 billion people live.

"The story included a vignette of the life of one peasant farmer and his two daughters, whom he was raising by himself. Their photograph stood in the middle of the page. As I looked into the huge eyes of those three strangers, my heart broke—and opened—all at the same time.

"I could not then, nor can I now, all these years later, explain why I was moved to act. Perhaps it was the simultaneous qualities of openness and sadness that I saw in the faces of those three strangers. Yet I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday where I was sitting. I remember that the sun was beginning to set. I remember picking up a pen and scrawling across the paper, ‘What can I do?’

"The next day, I tracked down the Times journalist in Beijing. He, too, had been touched, and he volunteered to serve as translator and intermediary between the farmer’s village and me. We began a series of letters, which took six weeks to get to and from Beijing and the tiny village in Guizhou Province in southwestern China. At the same time, the journalist and I were using email between Boston and Beijing—an ironic testament to the deep divide between urban and rural China.

"Through these letters, I learned that the poverty in this part of China, far away from the prosperous coast, is deep and persistent. The peasants eke out a living from thin limestone soil that just barely covers the steep sides of the beautiful karst mountains, which are reminiscent of the famous landscapes of Guilin. Some of them end each year too poor to even buy seed or fertilizer, let alone have the extra money they would need to send their children to school.

"There is simply nothing left for pencils or paper, or for rubber boots to keep the children’s feet dry, or for warm sweaters for the unheated classrooms. I decided to change that for some of the poorest children by sending money so that they could spend their days studying in classrooms, not working in fields.

"During the summer, the teachers went searching for the children I had promised to help. In September 1996, there were 50 new faces in the schoolyard. Fifty children were freed, momentarily at least, from the labors of the land and all eager to learn. I have been helping children every year since then.

"Beginning in 2003, the work of the Fund was expanded to include a program of literacy for peasant women. Each year, we help 100 children and 150 peasant women."

During the course of the dozen years the Fund has operated, it has passed a number of key milestones, including visits to meet Fund recipients in China, a very special award from the Harvard Divinity School, and a new partnership with Give2Asia for fiscal and programming support. To see a chart of the Fund’s milestones, click here.

Copyright © 2008 Gwen Moore Children of China Fund. All Rights Reserved.