China Times (www.chinatimes.net.cn) reporter Wen Mei trainee reporter Zhou Nan reported in Beijing
In 2016, after graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, Zhang Zhen returned to China with a master's degree, and was appointed as the secretary general of the Guangdong Ri ci public welfare foundation (hereinafter referred to as the "Ri Ci Foundation" or "Ri Ci"). That year, Zhang Zhen was 25 years old.
Founded on December 31, 2013 and officially put into operation in 2014, the Rici Foundation led and accompanied by Zhang Zhen is a non-public foundation dedicated to the spiritual growth and happy life of young children. Whether it is from the running time of the foundation or from the perspective of the psychological field of adolescents and children that the foundation focuses on, the Rici Foundation at that time, like Zhang Zhen, was a "novice" who was still groping in the public welfare circle.
When the "China Times" reporter asked Zhang Zhen what made her finally make up her mind to take on the burden and gnaw the "hard bones" of the psychological field, she replied: "Do the right thing" and "do the right thing" are very important, and on both levels, the thinking and doing of the Ri Ci Foundation are in line with her philosophy.
"At that time, the chairman of Rici (Qu Jiangting) told me, 'When people walk barefoot on the ground, their feet hurt, but you can't expect the whole earth to be built into roads, and the best way is to make a pair of shoes for yourself', and I was very touched and very agreeable. In fact, our children will experience a lot of setbacks in life, we expect them to have a smooth sailing, but we must help them establish a good psychological resilience, when they encounter things can be more positive, better coping. Psychological prevention for children is very valuable, and the psychological support that Rici gives to adolescents and children is to 'make a pair of shoes' for them. ”
The path of being the secretary general of the foundation is also uneven. RiCi's main projects, the Heart Benefit Project and the Spiritual Magic Academy, are aimed at rural children. Although the psychological problems of rural children urgently need attention, the overall public awareness of psychological problems is not high, and rural residents are even more so, and it is not easy for the public welfare projects initiated by Rici to be effective. The impact of the epidemic, the impact of occupational burnout and other factors have made Zhang Zhen quite stressed.
But she told reporters: "No matter what kind of way, for me personally, my dream is to be able to influence a group of people." When he said this, Zhang Zhen rarely slowed down his speech.
Zhang Zhen's positioning of the Rici Foundation is very realistic - "professional executive institution in the field of child psychology", and her attitude towards her own public welfare road is also grounded and true. Zhang Zhen frankly said that public welfare is one of the ways she creates social value and realizes self-worth, she has been doing things with the mentality of an entrepreneur, leading and accompanying Ri Ci with love and sincerity, and in the future, when the systematic operation of Ri Ci reaches a certain level, she may also choose to withdraw, so "we now try to let what we are doing precipitate in the system, try to ensure that it does not cause the collapse of a project or an institution because of the departure of anyone, which is what a professional public welfare organization should do." ”
Between the concise but determined words of this young secretary-general, the reporter saw the sensibility and sobriety of the "post-90s" public welfare people.
The following is a transcript of the interview:
Segment: Child psychology issues should not be marginalized
"China Times": Why did Ri Ci choose to be a rural child psychology?
Zhang Zhen: On the one hand, the psychological status of rural children is not optimistic, the risk of psychological problems of rural children is higher than that of urban children, some of them are left-behind children, lack of parental care, lower self-esteem, and high risk of depression, which are more challenging; at the same time, some rural areas, such as Hunan, although the local education bureau attaches importance to children's mental health education, they lack methods, materials, and training, and all they can think of is to encourage teachers to take the psychological counselor qualification certificate. Psychological counselors need long-term experience accumulation and professional supervision, so many teachers do not know how to do individual cases and how to effectively accompany students even if they have passed the examination, they need our support.
Cities, on the other hand, are harder to access. Usually, urban schools pay more attention to academics and are reluctant to take out special class hours to give psychology lessons; and in some cities, such as Shanghai, the education committee already has its own psychological teaching materials; moreover, the urban education system has a very strict management and review of the school curriculum, and the review cycle is long, so some schools also feel that "more is better than less", simply do not introduce new teaching materials.
Therefore, combined with the actual needs and rici's own capabilities, we chose to enter the countryside and open up the county. For example, we signed a cooperation agreement with the Education Bureau of Jingyang County, Shaanxi Province, to establish a practice base for mental literacy classes in local schools, which on the one hand has become an educational feature of the school, and on the other hand, more and more teachers have really felt the effect of the curriculum in children. In the future, when the county forms a sustainable ecology with the old and the new, Rici will also consider withdrawing.
"China Times": What is the biggest difficulty in doing public welfare in the field of rural children's psychology?
Zhang Zhen: At the R&D level, there are fewer relevant studies that can be referred to in China. This is related to the relatively short development time of social work disciplines in China, and in addition, the research direction of many teachers is closely related to national policies, and less attention is paid to the subdivision of rural children's psychology. As an executor, we pay more attention to the practical level, and can only do tests ourselves, and the "big head" of Rici is the cost of research and development, including the labor cost of research and development.
The difficulty at the executive level is that the concept of "psychology" is not well received. Doing psychological public welfare requires a good foundation of trust, we bring to the school is not the teaching building, multimedia classroom such a visible thing, want to rely on software direct access is very difficult. This year, an enterprise foundation introduced us to Xundian, Yunnan, hoping that we would do soft skills improvement for students, which is the first time that local teachers have heard about "mental health"; some schools have applied for courses, teachers have participated in training, but schools do not give class hours. Therefore, the real implementation to the implementation level still depends on the concept of the local education bureau, the principal and the teacher.
Overall, the teaching force in rural areas is weaker and more difficult to promote, but many teachers have changed in the process of receiving training and implementing teaching, and when a teacher is transformed, he can serve hundreds of children in his teaching career, which is very valuable.
"China Times": You mentioned that the psychological field that Ri Ci focuses on is not very accepted, do you think that there are mainstream areas and marginal areas in public welfare? Is Ri ci doing marginal areas?
Zhang Zhen: I prefer to call it a niche field. The word "mental" still stigmatizes, which is why our course is called the "Mental Literacy Class." The domestic psychological market is uneven, and the professional skills of licensed psychological counselors may not be guaranteed, in this case, there is still a gap of more than 400,000 psychological counselors. The psychological market has been slowly developing in recent years, so if psychology is still a new state in the business field, then its development in the field of public welfare may be slower.
We also thought about doing funding-type public welfare all the time, but through research, we found that there are many foundations that do student assistance, and everyone is distributing materials and building schools. When we did the industry scan report this year, we found that there are only about twenty institutions that focus on children's psychology, so the psychological issues in the industry are still niche, but it is not marginalized, but there are still too many people who have not paid attention.
But since the beginning of the epidemic, more and more people have been able to correctly understand the concept of "mental health". During the epidemic period, psychological assistance was provided to frontline medical workers and their families in an organized manner, and the social environment was much friendlier. After the resumption of classes last year, we paid attention to the extreme behavior of the children and urgently produced a "Epidemic Over the Sky" manual and distributed it to the school to guide the school to correctly pay attention to the mental health of the children under the epidemic. Now, the education system is more friendly to us, and we cooperate with the governments of Hunan and Henan.
Institutional Development: Rici is no longer an unpopular foundation
"China Times": At the beginning of 2017, there was a report about Ri ci called "The Survival Rule of the Unpopular Foundation", 4 years later, is the Rici Foundation still the Unpopular Foundation? What is Ri Ci's current law of survival?
Zhang Zhen: Indeed, the first two years of rici's establishment were in the state of nobody. Ri Ci's original intention was to do psychology, but at that time, because there was no team and other reasons, he did a student aid project to fund the orphans and disabled children of the Yi ethnic group in Liangshan. Since 2016, Rici has entered a stage of professional development and clearly positioned the psychology of rural children. Before returning to China, I began to do preliminary research and project design of the "Heart Benefit Program" and "Spiritual Magic Academy", and began to do offline training after returning to China in May. The psychological transformation of Ri Ci from student aid to specialization can be seen as 0-1, and the most difficult is 1-10. Many sponsors are only willing to do financial aid, and it is difficult to transfer them to psychological projects.
Rici has developed rapidly in recent years, our team has been updated to version 3.2, and the whole organization has done things in 2 times the speed, especially the two core brand projects "Heart Benefit Program" and "Spiritual Magic Academy".
By providing college student volunteers with course packages and training, so that they have basic child development and psychological knowledge and practical skills to carry out psychological activity classes, the "Xinyi Program" supports volunteers to carry out winter and summer camps on the theme of mental literacy in rural areas, helps rural children improve their psychological resilience, and fills the gap in psychological education in rural areas. As of March this year, the Project has supported 186 teams and 1,222 university student volunteers to carry out the "Mental Literacy Theme Camp", with a total of more than 170,000 hours of volunteer service, benefiting 14,960 rural children, and the project covers 25 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions across the country.
From the perspective of prevention, the "Academy of Spiritual Magic" project provides 8-12 participatory courses based on social-emotional learning theory and positive psychology on campus every semester to cultivate students' self-cognitive ability, emotional management ability and interpersonal skills, so as to improve their psychological resilience. As of March this year, more than 1.04 million mental literacy courses have been provided to 130759 children, 1,778 teachers and volunteers have been supported, and mental health education has been carried out in 937 schools.
Now when it comes to the field of child psychology, everyone will give priority to the project of Rici. In the past two years, we have also held theme forums to pay attention to children's psychological services and spread our voices together, and we must not only make Daily Mercy not cold, but also make psychological issues not cold. At the same time, the resources of Rici are also more diversified, from the beginning of the basic chairman fully funded, to now there are public fundraising, love business donations, fund-funded foundations to fund project research and development, etc., our sources of funds are becoming more and more abundant, and the risk coefficient is lower.
China Times: What is the focus of Rici's next step? What are your expectations for the future of Ri-Ci?
Zhang Zhen: Rici's curriculum research and development has entered the final stage, and it will continue to be improved according to the curriculum effect and teachers' opinions. The core work of these two years is to build a teacher training system, especially the county teacher team, Rici is doing the basic version, the advanced version of teacher training, and later consider doing TOT (Training of Trainer) training. In the next three years, our core work is to do a set of county mental health education mechanism construction, after the establishment of this mechanism, RiCi also considers the psychological curriculum this set of training into the campus culture, to help more schools form a complete ecology.
At the level of institutional development, we expect Rici to become a leading institution in the field of child psychology, and hope that what Rici does can affect the attention and participation of more government departments, and even affect relevant policies; we will also maintain professionalism, and professionalism in the field of child psychology is the first, so we must be cautious and focused, and we must continue to innovate, serve more children, and produce more different types of mental health tools to provide multiple paths for children, so that they can enjoy high-quality mental health services.
Individual role: "End-to-end" professional manager
China Times: Will you always do public welfare? Is philanthropy your dream?
Zhang Zhen: For me personally, my dream is to be able to influence a group of people, no matter how. Helping others is a wonderful thing, it's powerful in itself, and I hope to help more people. Rici is currently in the stage of 10-100, basically completed the polishing of the entire project model and the phased goal of business specialization, in the future, I may stay in Rici for another five or six years or more to achieve the goal of institutional professional governance. When cultivating a person who can lead Rici to continue to go on, I can do something with greater influence and benefit more people, it is not necessarily a direct public welfare, such as social enterprise, knowledge production, CSR, etc., but no matter what I do, I will continue to pay attention to and support the development of Rici.
China Times: Why cultivate a suitable leader before leaving? Have you started looking?
Zhang Zhen: Because leaving is fate after all. Some of our employees will think about what they should do well before leaving in the future, and how to minimize the loss of their departure to the organization as much as possible, which is actually a very responsible mentality.
At first, it was very painful for an employee to leave, but then I gradually realized that I had to accept this reality, as long as he accompanied Ri Ci on this journey with his heart and effort to do things well. It is really difficult for someone to accompany an institution all the time, and if a person is stuck in an affair for too long, he will be imprisoned, and the institution itself needs fresh blood to get better development, so leaving sooner or later will happen, and now I will consciously prepare in advance.
Many institutions think that only when the founder himself is the leader of the organization is more trustworthy, but in fact, the organization needs the role of a professional manager, we have to do things with an entrepreneurial mentality, we are actually doing intrapreneurship. Professional managers are the future of the public welfare industry must take the road, otherwise when the leader leaves, the development of the institution will fall into a bottleneck, and now there is no shortage of people in the industry who leave the phenomenon of a project collapse. Professional nonprofits need to prepare in advance to connect "successors" and "abdicators." Therefore, Ri Ci tries to let what is being done precipitate in the system, and a professional manager will consider the work of systematic construction before leaving, do data retention, process design, etc.
Only by starting from the end can we make the best plan for the institution and make the best preparation for it.
Generations of public welfare people: "Houlang" deserves to be seen
"China Times": How many public welfare people are the "post-90s" at present? How do you think the "post-90s" public welfare people are different from other generations of public welfare people? What are the biggest features?
Zhang Zhen: The entire industry is still dominated by "post-70s" and "post-80s", but there are more and more "post-90s". The Rici team is mainly "post-90s", and there are also some "post-80s", they have strong execution, and they are fast in advancing clear instructions, and all aspects will be more secure.
Perhaps no matter on which occasion, the "post-90s" group of people are the most difficult to bring (laughs), "post-90s" have more personality, more self, everyone's thought activity, self-expression desire, and self-worth, sense of achievement are very important. But this is also an advantage, so the "post-90s" will not be mechanically executed, will do things while thinking. Rici is a flat management, who is more thoughtful and more reasonable, whose views will be heard and absorbed more, which is also an advantage of our young team. And we dare to think and dare to do, willing to break through the inherent thinking to try, more agile.
China Times: You mentioned "self", do you think that as the secretary general of a "post-90s" foundation, can you be self?
Zhang Zhen: Absolutely not self. We can have our own firm ideas, but there is no way to drive others to do things together by relying on "self". The public welfare organization itself has limited personnel, and if you want to use limited manpower to make the expected results, you need to be very involved, so the Secretary-General should consider many parties, whether it is annual planning or future strategic planning, it must be a collective effort, and everyone agrees with each other. We do public welfare very much on the sense of identity and mission. Secretary-General is an emotionally overloaded profession, and I sometimes can't help but lose my temper with my husband (laughs), but in the agency, I pay more attention to the status and thoughts of others.
From a more utilitarian level, public welfare institutions are easy to lose talent, if some details are not considered in place, young people in the institution to get a sense of value, sense of achievement will directly affect their retention, so we should be more open to absorb everyone's suggestions, see everyone's advantages and strengths, put him in the right position, let him do what he is good at, like, they will be willing to spend effort. Moreover, people who study social work can usually sensitively capture the emotions of others, and will take the initiative to consider other people's ideas, which is difficult for themselves.
China Times: How do you view the "front wave" and "back wave" in the public welfare industry?
Zhang Zhen: The older generation of public welfare and the new generation of public welfare people need more exchanges and interactions. At present, the public welfare industry is sometimes shrouded in some ideas of the older generation, the "front wave" talks about itself, and the new person as the "back wave" also has a lot of ideas and confusion. On the one hand, the industry needs to inject fresher ideas, "houlang" needs to be seen, we are also worth seeing; on the other hand, our social work department does not even send a large number of talents to the public welfare field, many social work students will not choose related jobs after graduation, there is no positive cycle, we do not have so many talents to choose, and "houlang" is relatively inexperienced, so "houlang" is very much in need of "front wave" support, counseling and experience sharing.
The future of the industry: the service concept needs to be improved
China Times: What are your expectations for the future of the public welfare industry?
Zhang Zhen: First of all, we should continuously improve the professionalism of the industry. In the future, every field must be done in vertical depth, study a thing thoroughly, and lead this subdivision to develop forward. We can no longer do a big and comprehensive public welfare, can not be an institution and do the environment and education, we should be more specialized.
Second, in the future, the public welfare industry will be more in service, which is beyond doubt. Judging from the existing more mature NGO systems in Europe and the United States, most of them provide services. Donations are sometimes not the most necessary, we need to allocate funds more rationally, not only to do the traditional public welfare of materials, the industry needs to recognize this.
Third, in terms of cost, the industry should also raise the concept of service-oriented and be willing to invest in people. At present, many domestic public welfare fundraising platforms will clearly require that the cost of personnel cannot exceed 15-20%, but only professional people can provide professional services. Rici is a service-oriented organization, with more professional talents needed for R&D courses and project operations, and personnel funds account for nearly 50% of the institutional expenditure, while at this stage, more personnel funds come from the board of directors. Rici is very willing to invest in people, but also encourage employees to learn, each member has a learning fund, although the cost is high, but everyone has no worries, do things more quality. If the personnel of an institution live in a scene of worrying about food and clothing and their families do not agree, they cannot go all out to do public welfare. Therefore, the industry must change this point, in the cost can not be one-size-fits-all, to be judged according to the service situation of the institution and the actual cost, otherwise it is difficult to improve the quality of service.