On the afternoon of July 3, Pan Dingguo put on a white shirt, suit pants and clean leather shoes and got on the high-speed train from Guangzhou to Shenzhen. The purpose of the trip was to participate as a guest in the recording of a public service video program.

For more than ten years, Pan Dingguo has been on the front line of poverty alleviation work. Joining the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, he has traveled half the world to participate in domestic and international rescue operations; entering the Beyoncé Garden to become the leader of the poverty alleviation project in Yingde, he walked through two pairs of leather shoes in five months during the investigation and research.

It was not until these two years that Pan Dingguo began to gradually leave the front line and return to work at the company's headquarters, while sharing his practical experience to more people and continuing his poverty alleviation career in another way.

Perhaps it is used to burying his head in the sand, in the interview, for the specific poverty alleviation projects and experiences, Pan Dingguo can always talk eloquently, but in the evening of the trial rehearsal, standing alone in the spotlight to tell this experience publicly, he still seems a little nervous.

The recording site gathered people from various fields of public welfare, on stage, most of them look a little less skilled, but here, they all have a common goal: let more people see and participate in public welfare action.

In order to let more people see the new power of Chinese public welfare that is changing, China Charity Fair has created the video program "TIFP New Power of Public Welfare" to share the stories of new figures in the field of public welfare. For the second season, seven emerging speakers were recruited and selected to speak about rural revitalization and sustainable development.

In their stories, we can see that public welfare requires not only enthusiasm but also professionalism, and that public welfare is not only about giving but also about participation.

Another Life Choice

Born in a poor family in a small county in Jiangsu Province, Pan Dingguo's teenage years were an inspiring story of a poor student who changed his fate with knowledge. After graduating from college, Pan Dingguo was perfectly capable of leading a more decent life in the secular sense, but he chose to return to a poor area and teach in Guangdong's Yingde County, taking the road to poverty alleviation. Just as he had been helped at that time, he wanted to provide children in poor areas with life-changing opportunities through his own strength.

The seed of the ideal of giving to society was planted in high school.

When he entered junior high school in 2003, Pan Dingguo enrolled in Guohua Memorial High School in Shunde, Guangdong. This is a purely philanthropic, all free private school founded by Yang Guoqiang, the founder of the Bijou Group. The free tuition and full financial support not only greatly relieved his family's financial pressure, but also gave him the ability to improve his living conditions.

In Guohua's education, the value of "being a beneficiary of society, one should make dedication to society a lifelong pursuit" has always accompanied Pan Dingguo's growth and influenced his later life choices.

Before 2019, because he was always on the front line of poverty alleviation, Pan Dingguo's workplace was mobile, and he, his wife and children experienced seven years of separation and ups and downs as a result. Every time you change places, your wife always chooses to try to find a new job in the city where he is, but the family still gets together less and less.

As far as Pan Dingguo can remember, his wife has only once or twice suggested that he change his job offer, "but only to mention a mouth, did not do more to interfere with my choice".

The choice of public service, or a destiny, or out of chance, but the same is that most of them choose and shiny and comfortable life contrary to the road.

While young white-collar workers are having afternoon tea in bright offices with delicate makeup, Ren Xiaoyuan, a 90-year-old Beijing girl, is diving headlong into the countryside to work on rural water issues. In these places, it is still not easy to get clean drinking water.

Ren Xiaoyuan's introduction to public service was also in high school. Influenced by Jenny Goodall, a British female philanthropist, Ren gradually realized that there were people who were concerned about the world, nature and the future, in addition to their own achievements.

She couldn't help but ponder, "Although we are all so focused on achievement and success or failure now, what is the point of it all if it means that your future is gone?"

As her eyes and perceptions became broadened, she became more determined that doing public service was a worthwhile mission, and consciously chose to major in an environment-related field during her undergraduate and graduate studies.

As a graduate student studying abroad, she applied for water-related research and traveled to India several times to study water safety in poor communities, and gradually became concerned about the safety of drinking water in rural China.

From an idea on paper to gathering more people who are concerned about water, and really doing a lot of in-depth interviews and communication, Ren Xiaoyuan found that there is a lack of information about rural water issues in China, so she came up with the idea of creating "MyH2O Water Information Platform".

In 2017, Xiaoyuan Ren graduated with a master's degree and decided to return to China to work full-time on the platform, hoping to use her professional skills to help more people.

Focus on the environment, but also care about people's needs

Also in 2017, Beyoncé extended an olive branch to Pan Dingguo, hoping he would return to the group to engage in work related to poverty alleviation and public welfare.

At that time, Pan Dingguo was participating in humanitarian relief actions at home and abroad in China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation. Thinking that he could help more people on a bigger platform, he did not hesitate to return to Cinnamon.

Coincidentally, in a roundabout way, Pan Dingguo started from Guohua and then returned to Beyoncé, and the cause of poverty alleviation also started from Yingde and returned to Yingde. In the second year after he entered Beyoncé, he became the person in charge of Beyoncé's poverty alleviation project in Yingde.

But the work of poverty alleviation did not become less difficult because he was an "old friend". Unlike the imaginary local people who respect and love you when they hear that someone is coming to help them, the biggest difficulty that Pan Dingguo encountered in the process of poverty alleviation in the village was precisely the lack of understanding of the local people.

The project is considered by the local people to affect the feng shui and more obstruction, and even blocked in front of the excavator to obstruct the construction, land boundaries intensify the contradictions of the neighbors, do not give way to each other ...... Pan Dingguo has personally experienced the difficulties. In the silent night in the countryside, looking at the village with no relatives, loneliness and powerlessness have made him waver and even give up the idea.

But having these experiences also made Pan understand that doing charity should not be a matter of wishful thinking. "The problem is very simple, is to consider the problem from the perspective of the people themselves, understand their needs, but also tell them what you are trying to do, do not put yourself on high, think I am to help the old have a sense of superiority, what matters is respect, is the exchange of people."

In fact, it is also only by combining the wishes of local people and even allowing them to actively participate in the local construction that we can really solve the problems and promote the sustainable development of the place.

In realizing rural revitalization, Pan Dingguo mentioned that Beyoncé combines the advantages of corporate resources and the local characteristics of the countryside, and through an innovative business model, it can sustainably, replicably and systematically solve the problems faced by Chinese villages, such as stagnant agricultural products and difficult employment.

For example, the agricultural brand "Bixiang" in Gansu Dongxiang, fully exploit the local characteristics of agricultural products, such as Dongxiang sheep and Dongxiang potatoes, from production to marketing, forming an integration. "Only such a combination is diversified and blood-making, and can create sustainable value."

In the process of exploring how to solve the problem of water safety in villages, at first, the team chose to donate hardware facilities directly to villages, such as building water stations, installing water purifiers and so on. However, they soon found that the village people would not maintain the facilities properly when they were broken, and some people even took the parts of the facilities apart and sold them.

Faced with this situation, Ren and her team realized that they were only focusing on the environmental issues themselves, but had forgotten about the people in the environment.

So in the new project, they started working with the local community, involving them in the development and planning of the program together, participating in the pricing together, thinking about the direction of using the profitable income, and giving more sovereignty to the local area. "Getting them to have a sense of ownership and connection to this, to realize that it's something that's relevant to them, is what makes them want to do something like this in the long run."

The power of reaching out to the good, to be seen by more people

In July this year, the 2021 Beautiful China Charity Conference, hosted by New Weekly, was held in Shanghai. After the event that night, Beautiful China Recruitment and Alumni Impact Director: Chen Snap and the event guests planned to start a collaboration after communication. We couldn't help but feel that the value of the "platform" was truly realized this time.

The value of the platform is to gather and connect more forces for good, so that individuals, enterprises and organizations that are enthusiastic about participating in China's public welfare can better walk on the road of public welfare.

The night before the official recording of the "TIFP New Power of Public Welfare" video program, China Charity Fair also gathered public welfare people from various fields to share their practical experiences and learn from each other. As Guo Yunxia, Vice President and Secretary General of Shenzhen China Charity Fair Development Center, said, "It is not enough for one person to work hard, we need more exchanges and mutual learning."

This is the common vision of New Weekly and China Charity Fair's "TIFP New Power for Public Welfare" program, which allows more social issues and solutions to be better disseminated and more power for good to converge.

To create more public influence to mobilize more and more power is also Ren Xiaoyuan's vision to participate in this program.