On Tuesday, Dec 9th, Mr. Xu Yongguang, Vice Chairman and Secretary General, major initiator of Narada Foundation, and Ms. Yao Li, Chairperson of BN Vocational School were invited to the class of Entrepreneurial Leadership of School of Economics and Management in Tsinghua University, giving a speech with the topic of Sharing the Spirit, Experience and Wisdom of Start-ups and Innovation, at International Conference Center, Tsinghua Science Park.

Firstly，Mr. Xu Yongguang briefly introduced about his career development. About 30 years ago, he transferred to the Central Committee of Chinese Communist Youth League from Wenzhou, firstly worked as a general cadre, and then the minister of organization department. In 1987, he was the leader of the political system reform group of the Central Committee of Chinese Communist Youth League. At that time, one of the reform thinking was to establish a foundation raising money for youth development. He left the Central Committee when deciding to establish this foundation by himself.

Mr. Xu Yongguang started to prepare for “Project Hope” since 1988 and registered the China Youth Development Foundation in 1989 with the support of 100 thousand RMB from the Central Committee of Chinese Communist Youth League. After his own survey in the countryside, he found the situation in rural areas was so terrible, where both the faculty force and the teaching environment were poorly developed. He was shocked and made up his decision to “help the children in poverty areas”. The whole project was then named “Project Hope”.

Since 1990, "Project Hope" started to put donation advertisements in newspaper, and did collect a large sum of money in this way. Mr. Xu Yongguang emphasized that he was pursuing a spiritual value instead of the accumulation of wealth, and when he engaged in public welfare, he did not care about the assets but creating a brand for public service.

Mr. Xu Yongguang also said that corruption was pervasive, so the supervision of public funds had to get a strict procedure and mechanism to ensure the fund allocation and whole-course monitoring. In the whole process, none of enterprises to donate, public institutions to implement and the government to collaborate should be absent. The government was indeed earnest during the process. In the earthquake on May 12th, no child was killed in 146 reconstructed buildings of Hope School in the hard-hit areas. Beichuan Secondary school was crushed, while Beichuan Hope School still stood on the other side of the wall.

Mr. Xu Yongguang insisted that he was very bold, especially in certain investment projects. However, the bottom line was not to lose the freedom no matter what projects he worked on. In the foundation, all wages were posting, and individual income taxes were always not a Penny less. The foundation maintained to be an organization of fair integrity.

Following Mr. Xu’s speech, Ms. Yao Li put forward her own opinion of enterprise risk. As for her, it was very important to make an enterprise of integrity. She required all the staff not to bribe or commit any crime, even though in order to expand business. Since we were faced with plenty of temptations and challenges, strict management was quite necessary, that was, everything could to be checked and all documents had to conform to laws. She said, in the early time of her company, she worked together most with Chinese law firms. So it was with BN Vocational School and charitable organizations.  The very first thing to negotiate during the cooperation would br relevant law issues.

The original intention of Ms. Yao for BN Vocational School was to help the children from poor families get access to technical schools. She worshipped educators and believed in concrete actions. Thus, she decided to run her own vocational school, a vocational school free of charge. In the process, the more frustrating experiences she got, the less she felt scared of difficulties and failures. Having problems were normal; on the contrary, we should be especially careful when in a smooth development.

Finally, Ms. Yao reminded that everyone had his own situation varying from person to person. Thus one should choose their own future career taking one’s own personal situations into account.

After the report, Mr. Xu Yongguang and Ms. Yao Li interacted with the audience, answering all kinds of questions from the students.

Mr. Xu Yongguang is the Vice Chairman and Secretary General, Vice Chairman of China Youth Development Foundation, Master of Laws, part-time professor at China University of Political Science and School of Management, Dalian University of Technology, and the Ninth and Tenth CPPCC National Committee. He devotes himself to NGO in China for nearly 20 years, establishing and developing the “Project Hope”. He has an important contribution in NGO practice and research field, editing “study on the third section in China series”, and writing “Inquiring human and nature, Xu Yongguang talking about Project Hope”. With the tenet of supporting the non-government commonweal, Narada Foundation concerns about China’s social problem during the transformational period, aiming at establish a new citizens plan to improve the environment for children of migrant workers, which is called the second Project Hope by Xu Yongguang.

Ms. Yao Li is Initiator of BN Vocational School and Chairperson at the present. BNVS was established in 2005 with the support of China Youth Development Foundation, as the China's first charity vocational school to provide apprenticeship and practical skills to students from rural areas who reside in Beijing. It is sponsored by a number of corporations, which provide internship and working opportunities for graduates from the school. Chairperson Yao Li used to be the general manager of Beijing Yinda Property Management Corporation. In order to help these poor migrant workers’ children, she left her successful career for BN Vocational School.