Migrant Workers Community

 

    Zigen sponsored center has taken roots in the community of migrant workers in Shahe, a suburb of Beijing. It offered migrant workers’ children homework assistance, after-school care, and extra-curricular activities. The center also organized community events, competitions, educational and self-improvement classes for migrant workers themselves. The Beijing migrant workers center thrived under leaders groomed from within the community and volunteers from outside the migrant worker community.

 

Service to Migrant Workers Communities

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• Support rural laborers and their families who migrate to urban areas to make a living, and encounters hardship, welfare negligence and discrimination.

• Program started in 2005, when very few similar services existed in Beijing.

• While supporting migrant children’s schools with scholarship, libraries, sporting equipments and extra-curricular activities, and providing services to migrant families, the community center, now located in Shigezhuang Village in the northern suburb of Beijing, also involves a constant flow young volunteers from all over the world. The program has been quite successful in terms of building a network for civic minded people from all walks of life.

• While working together with the migrant families and communities, we have also done researches on issues and problems associated with migrant people, building a solid case for advocacy in this field.

• When engaging the migrant workers, we practice the principles of equality, respect, and participation in our program, with a special effort in encouraging women’s participation.

• Our strategic partners have not been confined to migrant children’s schools, but expanded to include public schools that have significant concentration of migrant children.

• The total spending of service to migrant workers communities each is, excluding scholarships, about $30,000.

 

Examples of projects:

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• A thrift store in Shigezhuang Village, with donated clothes, serving migrant workers;

• Weekend movie showing at construction workers’ dorms;

• Zigen supports around 17 migrant worker children’s schools in Beijing and provided tuition assistance to 278 students (total cost was approximately $8,500 USD), as they are excluded from the cost-free national education system.

• Expanded scholarship, a recent pilot project, covering more migrant children’s schools that are spread out from Shigezhuang village, where our community center is located, thus benefiting more migrant children and their family in need. Right now, the expanded scholarship covers eight migrant children’s schools in townships of Huilongguan, Beiqijia and Machikou, benefiting 160 students from migrant families with economic hardship.

• Migrant children forming grow-up partners with college student volunteers.

• After-school extra curricular reading, tutoring, and talent training classes

• Zigen supported libraries in 4 migrant workers’ residential communities and supported activities centers in two residential communities.

• An oral history project, in the form of A Collection of Stories from Migrant Workers, compile and edited by migrant workers themselves.