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Yes, there is such a thing as a free lunch for poor kids
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THERE is such a thing as free lunch. Meet Deng Fei, founder of the charity program mian fei wu can, or Free Lunch.
Started in April 2011, the Free Lunch initiative is the first such public fund providing free lunches to students in remote, poverty-stricken areas. It was launched by Deng and 500 like-minded journalists, lawyers, professionals, low-level officials and volunteers.
Due to the long distance between home and school, often made more arduous by mountainous terrain, these students cannot go home for lunch and have suffered from hunger and health problems caused by malnutrition.
“Since the program started, we have been feeding more than 80,000 children a day from 300 schools in central and western China,” the 36-year-old veteran journalist tells Shanghai Daily.
Deng spent the past 11 years as an investigative journalist with Hong Kong-based Phoenix Weekly magazine and is known for hard-hitting journalism. His articles include his expose of the underground trade in dead pigs for reprocessing and sale.
“I write about the murkiest part of this country,” says Deng, who is now a senior editor at Phoenix Weekly.
For a reporter who usually spends his time chasing the big stories and getting the next scoop, charity might seem a bit unlikely. How did he get the idea?
It all started with a conversation in early 2011 with a volunteer teacher named Xiaoyu from Guizhou Province. Deng learned that most pupils in rural schools skipped lunch because their homes were far away and decrepit schools didn’t have canteens.
Grumbling stomachs
Astonished, Deng and media friends visited the mountainous province for a reality check. It was worse than expected. Starvation was part of life.
“It pained me to see the children drink cold water to deceive their grumbling stomachs,” says Deng.
To his dismay, Deng found that China has no equivalent of the free lunch programs in many developed and even developing countries like India.
“There’s no point blaming the education authority for this, for its job ostensibly is about educating children, not feeding them. Food is supposed to be the responsibility of parents,” says Deng. He ascribed the children’s misery to the demographic changes in rural China. Urbanization’s demand for labor has prompted the children’s parents to migrate to cities in search for jobs. The children are left behind with aging grandparents.
There are an estimated 67 million left-behind children in China. “The problem of rural children going hungry is a painful product of China’s development,” Deng tells.
In the absence of a government lunch program, Deng decided to take matters into his own hands, and raise money to fund a free lunch scheme. Two months after the heart-wrenching fact-finding trip, and with the help of friends and internet users on Weibo, the nonprofit Free Lunch was founded under the China Social Welfare foundation.
By Chinese law, the capital threshold for setting up a non-profit qualified to raise money is 20 million yuan (US$3.2 million). Deng opted instead to register his fund under the social welfare foundation, which exempted him from the mandatory startup fund.
On April 2, a primary school in Qianxi County in Guizhou became the first beneficiary of Deng Fei’s endeavor.
With a mere 20,000 yuan in initial donations, a kitchen was built and put into operation that day, when 169 students ate their first free lunch in years. The meal consisted of rice, a hard-boiled egg, a spoonful of fried pickles and meat, baked potatoes and cabbage soup.
To increase donations, Deng and his team turned to the Internet. They organized charity auctions on Taobao, China’s leading e-commerce platform, where volunteers can contribute personal items. By December 2013, proceeds swelled to 75.7 million yuan.
“When you are doing the right thing, you will find the entire society is behind you,” says Deng with feeling.
At a time when public trust of government-backed charity is at a record low because of scandals over embezzlement and misuse of funds, isn’t Deng worried that the donations might be spent on someone’s designer bag?
He says this concern is well-founded but his Free Lunch scheme is transparent and open, so far scandal-free. The fund publishes fiscal reports that can be downloaded for public scrutiny from its website (www.mianfeiwucan.org). Deng demands that schools follow suit. Recipients of donations must open a Weibo accounts to disclose all the specifics on spending.
While the Free Lunch campaign generated a groundswell of support, its very success has also given rise to criticism that he is doing what should be the government’s job, in effect, letting the government off the hook. Deng disagrees and says his project “actually turns up the heat on the government.”
“Before there was Free Lunch, officials could justify inaction by citing lack of funds or policy limitations. But now some journalists have set an example and shown it’s completely workable.”
“My intention is to demonstrate the feasibility of what I call micro-charity,” says Deng. “It doesn’t have to start high. By donating 3 yuan a day, you can help a lot of needy students.”
Softness works
The children’s rights advocate is now studying the possibility of providing health care for rural children from impoverished families. These days, Deng is traveling around the country promoting his book “Softness Changes China.” Asked if he still is a “soft” person after encountering some of the country’s ugliest secrets, he says, “Yes. After writing the most negative news for 11 years, I didn’t become depressed or cynical. I still am able to walk out of the darkness, and even take pity on the evil. This is what I define as ‘softness.’”
Deng often takes inspiration from a poem by American Emily Dickinson, “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain...”
Anne Ma, Zhou Erquan and members of Fudan University’s student union contributed to this story. To make a donation, please visit www.mianfeiwucan.org.
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