About Us
A. Introduction
Sichuan Teachers is a registered non-profit organization in Hong Kong. It is initiated and organized by some volunteers home and abroad who are greatly concerned with the education in the areas affected by the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. We include professors and students from some of the best universities in the world including Harvard, Oxford, Peking, Tsinghua, etc. We also have professionals in the industries. We gather with a common goal--to provide long-term academic help and tutorials to children directly affected by the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. We recruited teachers in renowned institutes such as Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, Chicago, Julliard, Florida, Illinois, Wisconsin, Toronto, Waterloo, Queen's, Australian National, Peking, Tsinghua, Fudan, Jiaotong, Sichuan, HKUST, Hong Kong, CUHK, etc. The percentages of them having completed or completing their PhD, Masters, undergraduate and high school degrees are approximately 20, 20, 50 and 10.
B. How to become a volunteer teacher?
Please make your pledge now to become a Sichuan Teacher. Your commitment can be flexible. You could choose to teach your student(s) once a week or month. Please click "Create new account" on the left to start. If you apply as a " teacher", please click "Create your Teacher Profile" after you log on. Else, please click "Create your Student Profile". Currently, student applications are by invitation only. We send out our staff to fill out the forms with the students if necessary.
Teachers are encouraged to vote for each other if they know the other teachers in person and they think they have entered accurate personal data. The results are displayed in the "Search for Teachers" page. Only teachers who have obtained a relatively high scores receive the right to vote and are immediately allowed to see and use the "Voting Booth" page. Teachers should give their personal ID to the voters they know.
Participants are free to choose what they want to teach or learn. Some NGOs partnered with us might have other requests; they will notify the teachers separately.
There are two methods to be matched:
1. Remote Teaching. Volunteers and students are matched through our website
2. Local Teaching. Though our system, volunteers apply for as many NGOs as they want from the NGOs partnered with us. The NGOs then notify each volunteer through our system whether they accept the applications.
For the first method, we will match you with a student and notify you immediately according to the matching method here. You are free to teach once a month or week. Quite a few victims have been relocated to other cities. Our volunteer teachers have already started teaching them in those areas. For those people who prefer to stay outside China, they are now communicating with the students through real-time Internet services(MSN, QQ), land phones, cell phones, e-mail and postal mail. In addition, we could, for example, offer free weekly one-on-one English lessons or trained counseling to students through a sponsored cell phone shared by 5 children, with a student possessing the phone on a school day and pass on to another person the next day. We also received some funds to provide free cell phones to one to two hundred victims. Some less damaged schools have promised to let us use their computer labs (with Internet access and web cam facilities) for teaching.
For the second method, please do as following:
1. Choose the NGO event(s) that you want to apply;
2. If you are accepted to an event, the NGO will send you an e-mail through our website;
3. Outside our system, please email the NGO yourself whether you want to accept the offer;
4. The NGO will contact you again for further logistic details;
5. After being matched successfully, please log on our website to evaluate the NGO
C. How to partner with us as an NGO? Please do the following:
1. Please e-mail inquiry@sichuanteachers.org, then we will create an account for you;
2. Please log on to create your profile and post your events;
3. You will see the real time information about which volunteers have applied your events. Please accept your applications in our system and send a notice to the selected volunteers through our website;
4. After receiving the confirmation from volunteers, contact them and give them further logistic details as needed.
D. How to join "Sichuan Teachers" as working members? Please join our planning team and working teams.
E. Donations For donations, please click here. We accept USD, HKD, RMB, and other major currencies.
F. Suggestions Please write to inquiry@sichuanteachers.org for inquiries, contact us to report bugs or request system features.
G. Acknowledgments
Lastly, thanks to our sponsors, our planning team and working members, volunteer teachers, government officials, local school staff, and everyone who has offered help.