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| Amanda Hsiung |
Katie: Thanks for speaking with me
today! It’s always great to get a picture of what our alums are doing post-HNC.
Can you tell me a little more about your job?
Amanda: Thank you, Katie. I’d be happy
to! The Global Fund for Children (GFC) is a nonprofit organization that works
to advance the dignity of children worldwide by making small grants to
innovative community-based organizations working with many of the world’s most
vulnerable children. As the Associate Program Officer for East and Southeast
Asia at GFC, I manage over 40 grantees in eight countries in the region,
including China.
Katie: And you get to travel a lot with
your job, right?
Amanda: Yep, that’s one of the best
parts of the job! I get to travel to the region 3-4 times a year, including at
least once to China. While I’m traveling, I visit our current grantee partners
to monitor our grant implementation, scout for great new potential partners
that fit our model, and sometimes convene our partners for networking,
knowledge sharing, and capacity building.
Katie: Are there any challenges
associated with doing this kind of work in China considering how sensitive
NGO-work can be?
Amanda: Small community-based
organizations face difficulties everywhere and China of course has its own
particular challenges. One of the biggest obstacles for the types of small,
nascent, and innovative organizations that we look to support is the difficulty
just of registering as an NGO. While there were almost 500,000 registered NGOs
at the end of 2012, according to some estimates the number of unregistered
groups might be twice that number, with about 1 million civil society
organizations either operating without a proper legal identity or registered as
companies. Working without an NGO registration leaves organizations vulnerable
to legal difficulties, and makes it difficult to find funding as donors like
GFC often can’t provide funding to unregistered groups due to the financial
risk involved.
Katie: Has this situation changed at
all since the leadership transition in 2012?
Amanda: Definitely. We’ve seen several
promising developments for Chinese NGOs this past year. The new government has
focused on what it has coined the “small government, big society” agenda, which
includes a focus on outsourcing social services to NGOs. The government also
seems to recognize the need for policy reform to accomplish this agenda, and
the announcement at the 18th National Congress of easier
registration requirements for NGOs to debut by the end of 2013 was definitely a
promising sign. Some analysts have heralded this as proof of the start of a new
reform era for Chinese civil society. I am still not ready to go that far, but
am cautiously optimistic.
Katie: What kinds of effects of these
higher level developments have you seen on the ground?
Amanda: Great question. I was actually
just in Xining to hold a capacity building and knowledge sharing workshop on the
topic of “Building Sustainable Charity Organizations”. One thing that stood out from that workshop
was a definite shift in the funding landscape for Chinese NGOs. We had
participants create a collective map of their funding sources over the last ten
years which showed very clearly that most participants began to receive some
kind of government funding within the last two years, demonstrating the
government’s increased investment in NGOs. In addition to government support,
participants also began to receive funding from domestic foundations after 2008
(the year of the Sichuan earthquake) and are increasingly receiving corporate
funding. So, while ten years ago, international foundations clearly dominated the
NGO funding landscape in China, now there are a lot more actors in this space.
Katie: What does this mean for small,
grassroots Chinese NGOs?
Amanda: Well, first of all, I think it
definitely brings opportunities. Last year, the Ministry of Civil Affairs
awarded 200 million RMB (over $30 million USD) to social service organizations,
including several of our partners. And, as we have seen with partners who have
received MCA funding, this investment has a trickle-down effect as domestic
foundations as well as provincial and city-level also invest in organizations
with the MCA’s stamp of approval.
Katie: But are there any challenges to
working with the government for NGOs?
Amanda: There are definitely challenges
for NGOs who are learning to work with government agencies or other new funders
for the first time. As an example, implementing MCA funded-programming has been
difficult for our smaller partners, as the funding is extremely restrictive and
comes with intensive reporting requirements that are very taxing for a small
NGO to fulfill. At the workshop, partners also identified maintaining their
organization’s core mission and vision while working with new types of funders
as another key challenge. And there is definitely a learning curve for working
with new types of funders, as everything from the language you use in
proposals, what kind of items you can include in the budget, to what kind of
reporting is required is different based on the type of donor. So this is
definitely an area we’ve identified where we can hopefully provide capacity
building support in the future.
Katie: Your work sounds really
interesting! Do you feel that your time at HNC helped prepare you for your job?
Amanda: Absolutely! First of all, HNC
was just such a game changer in terms of language skills for me. I took four
years of Chinese in undergrad, including one semester of study abroad at BeiDa,
but actually doing substantive coursework in Chinese at HNC versus traditional
language study increased my language ability more than all my previous study
put together. This has been really helpful, since a lot of our Chinese partners
don’t speak English so all of their proposals, reports, and emails are in
Chinese. Beyond the language skills, I think my time at HNC, from the courses
taught by the Chinese professors to spending a whole year living with my
Chinese classmates, also helped develop an understanding of Chinese culture and
society that has been critical to me ability to work successfully with our
Chinese partners and to manage our China portfolio.
Katie: Thanks so much for stopping by!
Amanda: Any time.
