On March 25, after the Southern Metropolis Daily Public Welfare Weekly published the article "Daliang Mountain without Shoes", readers called our newspaper one after another, hoping to donate for children lacking shoes. Recently, the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation said that the domestic sporting goods company will cooperate with Tmall Mall and the Foundation to carry out the public welfare project of "buy one good one care one". Every time consumers buy a pair of customized adult sports shoes through Tmall Mall, the enterprise will simultaneously donate a pair of customized sports shoes to children in the donated areas. At present, this project has been launched and is planned to be launched on April 1 - this will further reduce the threshold for the public to participate in shoe donation.
In addition, as early as 2012, the China Children's Charity and Relief Foundation, together with Cui Yongyuan's "My Long March" team and Sohu, launched the public welfare action of "giving children a pair of sports shoes" to donate shoes to children in poor areas who lack shoes.
Donating shoes directly is not that simple
The independent evaluation and consultation organization Gongyu Heli once investigated the lack of shoes of primary school students in Liangshan Prefecture of Sichuan Province and Bijie Prefecture of Guizhou Province, two state-level poverty-stricken counties. The results showed that in 2012, the central school of the visited township in Bijie County of Guizhou Province received a total of 50000 yuan of donated materials. About 33.3% of the interviewed students received donations, of which only 3.3% received donations of shoes. Schools that have received shoe donations have all experienced the problem of inappropriate size. "Once a primary school student received shoes of more than 40 yards, which could not be worn at all," said a principal of the county. 22.2% of the surveyed pupils do not like the donated shoes, which is largely due to the inappropriate size.
Want to donate shoes, but how to find the children who lack shoes? How many pairs of shoes do they need a year? What kind of shoes do you like? What's the size of children's shoes?
Donating shoes is not that simple. Investigators from the public domain working together found in two village schools in Bijie area that the donor had not done demand research before donating shoes, and then directly sent the shoes to the school for distribution. Due to insufficient research on shoe type, style and size in the early stage, coupled with poor management of distribution, shoe donation is not ideal. "We received a batch of shoes last year, and we sent them out according to the situation. Some children gave 2-3 pairs of shoes, and some did not," said a primary school principal interviewed.
"There is no statistical data on shoe donations." The report points out that there are some practical reasons for the lack of shoe donations. The first reason is that it is difficult to obtain accurate information about children lacking shoes. On the one hand, children without shoes live in relatively poor areas, and it is difficult to communicate with the outside world. On the other hand, even if the information of children is collected, their shoe size changes greatly because the children are in the growth stage.
Based on the survey of children lacking shoes in the two counties, the public domain joint force survey team suggested that shoes should be donated to fixed poor primary school students continuously and stably. In addition, the report also encourages donations to primary school students from extremely poor and poverty-stricken families. In terms of donation mode, it is suggested to implement "full coverage" donation, that is, donation should be made in the township, village or primary school where pupils are concentrated. "It not only ensures the probability of pupils from such families getting a gift, but also is easy to operate and not easy to cause disputes."
For shoe types, the survey team suggested donating shoes that are non slip, strong, warm, comfortable, and of good quality for sports. Finally, when donating, it is necessary to take into account the growth of the child, and make donation on the basis of statistical size.
Donate money to buy shoes for children
Because of a series of practical difficulties, there are few public welfare projects dedicated to donating shoes to children. It is understood that "sending a pair of sports shoes to children" is a public welfare project that is still running. In 2012, the China Children's Charity Relief Foundation, Cui Yongyuan's "My Long March" team and Sohu jointly launched the public welfare action of "giving children a pair of sports shoes" to donate shoes to children in poor areas who lack shoes. Dong Fuguang, a staff member of the project, said that compared with clothes donation, shoes donation is more one-on-one, because each child's foot size is different, and the accuracy of data is required to be higher than clothes donation. For this reason, the public welfare project chooses to cooperate with public welfare organizations rooted in poor areas, such as the Wheat Field Plan, Free Lunch, etc. The volunteers or school leaders who know about the school information directly report to the project team to collect information about children lacking shoes.
Secondly, the project team collected shoe manufacturers through the network, and selected reliable and cost-effective shoe manufacturers for cooperation through field investigation and comparison, and publicized them online. After the shoes are made, they are delivered to the school through logistics, and received by the volunteers who help the school to declare, to supervise the school to distribute them uniformly. The school will feed back the sign in form and send shoes photos to the project team, and the project team will make a sample return visit to the school. It generally takes one month from shoe size collection to shoe distribution, but it takes two months in winter and summer vacations.
At the initial stage of the project operation, due to the poor communication with the school in the project area, the shoes were too small, so they had to be replaced urgently. At present, the project has customized sports shoes for 73095 students in 446 schools across the country. At the same time, there are 128 schools that have declared to be waiting for donation. However, due to the large number of children lacking shoes, the launch and establishment of the activity is not long, and the consumption of shoes also needs some time, so the project team will not accept the application of the donated schools for the time being.
Buy one and donate one
If you don't want to donate money, are there other ways to help children lacking shoes? From April 1, "thin wallet" lovers have a new choice: buy one and donate one.
It is reported that 361 times, together with the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation and Tmall Mall, launched a large-scale public welfare project of "Buy One Good One, O n ecares One", which is the first time in China to propose a consumer public welfare model of "Buy One Good One" - every time consumers buy a pair of customized adult sports shoes of the enterprise, Pupils in poverty-stricken areas will receive a pair of specially designed sneakers of the same brand donated to them in the name of consumers.
For this reason, the enterprise has set up a special research and development team to research and develop customized adult shoes and children's shoes. Among them, children's shoes donated to children have the characteristics of "more wear-resistant soles" and "more protective shoes", which are more suitable for walking on rugged mountain roads. "Onecares one" also tries to solve the problem of matching information and materials between "supplier" and "demander". The China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation is responsible for providing data on donated children and monitoring the implementation and distribution of donated materials.
In addition, "onecaresone" also cooperates with Tmall Mall, the largest e-commerce platform in China, to facilitate the statistics of consumer data. Yahoo! Is responsible for building all the recipient databases and donor databases (consumer databases), and connecting with Tmall payment platform at the same time. For the first time, it is able to retrieve and query from the Internet. In this project, consumers (donors) and recipients are corresponding one by one, and the donation process and logistics can be tracked through the official website of "onecaresone" - realizing the "visualization" of the donation and logistics process.
Consumers buy shoes, manufacturers donate, and poor children benefit - in fact, this kind of consumer public welfare model has long existed abroad. In 2006, Blake mycoskie, an American, found that Argentine children had been barefoot for a long time due to poverty and walked on the land with excessive silica, resulting in foot diseases. The old shoes donated by tourists often did not fit. So he founded a shoe making enterprise called TOMS (TOMS Shoes). As long as consumers buy a pair of shoes, TOMS will donate a new pair of shoes to children who lack shoes. This model of buying one and donating one is called "BOGO" model (buyonegifts one).
(By Liu Sunan)
