(Photo by iStock/caoyu36)
With the first reports of COVID-19 emerging from China, the nation has had the most time to respond to the crisis and recently reported no new infections. Its nascent and rapidly growing civil society sector has played a prominent role in helping individuals, communities, and government organizations cope with the unprecedented situation.
As other countries on different timelines begin to encounter similar challenges, what can civil society organizations within their borders learn from the Chinese to avoid their mistakes and replicate their successes? Below is a look at some projects, organized by trend, showing how organizations within the country have helped secure medical supplies; provide mental health support; keep people accurately informed; enforce social distancing; minimize economic impact; and advance other important emergency undertakings.
1. Responses From Traditional Foundations and Donation Platforms
Civil society organizations that have been operating relatively longer than others in China jumped in to help, mostly through programs they run themselves rather than grants, given the way most of them are structured. While their efforts were impressive, the president of China Global Philanthropy Institute (CGPI), Zhengyao Wang, argued that there is room to improve coordination between the social sector and government.
Still, some success stories exist. In one example, the Ginkgo Foundation led and funded a network of volunteers, called “Gingko fellows in Wuhan," to operate programs in the city, the epicenter of the outbreak. One Gingko fellow, Hao Nan, set up a support group for stay-at-home patients. It helped with interviewing patients, connecting them to medical resources, and getting them supplies when hospitals were overwhelmed. Other Ginkgo fellows organized a volunteer group in Wuhan to provide transportation to the most vulnerable groups, and obtain and deliver thousands of oxygen concentrators to hospitals and individuals. The foundation also set up an international relief team and put together this website for foreign aid assistance. It includes guides in various languages to help people with challenges that might be pronouncedly acute during the crisis, such as providing end-of-life care and/or managing a pregnancy.
Foundations riding on the popularity of their celebrity founders, such as Han Hong's Han Hong Love Charity Foundation and Jet Li's One Foundation, were among the most active in mobilizing medical resources and volunteers for deployment in Wuhan and around the nation. The private Han Hong Love Charity Foundation raised hundreds of millions yuan, and was widely praised for its focus on getting medical supplies donations and deploying them while remaining highly transparent about its activities. Conversely, the state-backed charity organizations in Wuhan were under fire for mishandling donations and medical supplies.
Platforms that gather and distribute donations to Chinese civil society organizations raised millions of dollars. Give2Asia, which works with organizations in China such as China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation and Beijing Chunmiao Foundation, helped with immediate frontline disaster relief and longer-term efforts.
2. Responses From Informal Volunteer Groups and Burgeoning Organizations
People outside the established civil sector played an instrumental role in crisis relief and mutual aid. Though the groups' self-organized aid efforts demonstrated remarkable agility and effectiveness, many of them have not been able to sustain themselves beyond the current crisis. Driving their dissolution are fears of losing their independence to government control and their lack of a longer-term vision to keep volunteers together.
One example of a group helping in Wuhan is NCP Life Support Network. The volunteer network was founded by Hao Nan, China's leading disaster relief social entrepreneur, who also played a prominent role in organizing civil society aid during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The network includes an online clinic featuring a team of more than 400 volunteer health workers around the country. They help patients with virtual care support and self-care guidance, mental health support, and end-of-life support for families in need. Other initiatives include a mutual aid group for pregnant women and an information support group. The network operates multiple active WeChat chat groups with volunteers to coordinate collaboration.
Alumni groups at one point became some of the most active and productive players in channeling emergency donations and disaster relief supplies, due to their cross-border outreach network and trust among members. Wuhan University Alumni Association of Greater New York, one of many alumni associations outside the Chinese mainland, donated and shipped 12 batches of medical supplies to more than 90 hospitals in Hubei in January and February. By one account, alumni organizations at 47 universities across China provided critical goods and financial support to fill the gap at frontline hospitals in Wuhan, donating more than $21 million (150 million RMB) and 1,000 tons of medical supplies.
In late January, a group of independent coders and developers in China came together and formed Wuhan2020. They attempted to craft an effective digital solution in combating COVID-19. They started with solving the severe medical supply shortage problem among hospitals in Wuhan. How? They consolidated and validated demand-supply information of masks and other medical supplies in hospitals in Wuhan and around China. With 3,000 developers and more than 3,000 other types of volunteers, the project has evolved into a mission-driven global collaborative. Led by Xue (Xander) Wu, a volunteer who attended Stanford University Graduate School of Business and is currently based in California, the group, in collaboration with IBM, launched an online hackathon, Hack for Wuhan, which encouraged other helpful digital responses to the crisis.
Another group called A2N was set up by veteran internet users in their 20s to curb the spread of disinformation and rumors in tandem with the outbreak of COVID-19 in late January. It expanded into verifying the legitimacy of the certification of medical supplies being shipped to hospitals. The group also provided websites to aggregate information about the disease and to map its spread.
Blazing Youth Community was formed by young entrepreneurs, returning study-abroad students and professionals, and researchers in Wenzhou, a major commercial and manufacturing hub in eastern China. The group helps places hit hardest by COVID-19, working closely with the Global United Wenzhou Society to extend aid to more than a dozen countries, from Italy to Iran.
Bridge Bed Team is a China-based online volunteer group that focused on information gathering and sharing during the crisis in Wuhan. They collaborated with El pueblo unido jamás serávencido (EPU-JSV), a China-based NGO named after a Spanish song that researches global grassroots groups. Together they collected and shared information on COVID-19 mutual-aid communities worldwide here and here.
3. Responses From the Business Community
The public health crisis has also seen a flourishing of efforts by corporations, which accounts for 65 percent domestic philanthropy in China. Besides offering financial support, corporate foundations also have a rich suite of skills and expertise to offer that vary according the business they are in.
Following in Bill Gates’ footsteps, Jack Ma's foundation committed $14.4 million for coronavirus vaccine efforts. In the meantime, Alibaba, the company Jack Ma founded and that is often referred to as the "Amazon of China," rolled out new digital solutions, such as an international medical expert exchange platform (“Global MediXchange for Combating COVID-19"). Alibaba's grocery delivery platform, Hema, launched a "shared worker initiative," first to meet its own urgent need for new service workers to handle skyrocketing grocery delivery orders. It ended up starting a new trend in China's gig economy by borrowing employees from restaurant chains, gyms, and other companies struggling to keep their payrolls.
Other corporate foundations have jumped in with sourcing much needed medical supplies. The Fosun Foundation was among the first to leverage its global medical supply networks to source personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators. They were shipped to hospitals in Wuhan and more recently to facilities in Italy, India, and New York City.
Bytedance, in partnership with the Chinese Red Cross Foundation, donated $28 million (200 million RMB) to provide financial assistance for medical workers and families.
The digital health platform WeDoctor, working with the internet company Tencent, launched the WeDoctor Global Covid-19 platform to offer real-time support to 60 million overseas Chinese and anyone else outside China seeking help. The platform provides handbooks, mental and physical health support, and Traditional Chinese Medicine consultations. More than 7,000 doctors from top hospitals in China provide services through the platform.
Tensions and Lessons Ahead
The crisis in China has triggered an extraordinary outpouring of aid within the country that has stretched beyond its borders. The flood of initiatives has also shed an informative light on some of the longstanding questions faced by Chinese civil society organizations. How can they work more effectively with a strong and centralized government that can mobilize the nation's remarkable resources? How can they build better infrastructure to coordinate their efforts? How can they help protect the privacy of citizens as tech companies share more data with the government? And how can digital solutions be more user centric and more effective for frontline volunteers? As they develop answers to these questions throughout this crisis and the years beyond it, they are sure to produce more innovative solutions that inspire their civil society peers around the globe.
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Read more stories by Eva Woo.