Founded in 1999, Beijing Children’s Legal Aid and Research Center (“BCLARC”), was the first Chinese NGO specializing in children’s rights. BCLARC is well-known in China for its role of speaking up child rights both in individual cases and at the policy level. BCLARC also gains reputation from its relentless efforts mobilizing legal profession, civil society organizations, media, and government to promote child welfare in China. More than 100,000 minors and their families have benefited from the legal services of BCLARC. It has already deeply participated in the draft or revision work of Minors’ Protection Law of PRC, Anti-domestic Law and other policies concerning child rights protection. BCLARC is active in bridging local needs and global governance and introducing international standards to China.
With the support of BCLARC, Beijing Zhongzhi Child’s Care Foundation launched the “Rural Kindergarten Development Plan” in 2014, aiming at serving the rural kindergartens and caring for rural left-behind children. Since its establishment, the project has always insisted on providing high-quality public welfare training for rural preschool teachers and carrying out a variety of public good activities for rural children. After eight years of development, there have been more than 390 rural kindergartens in the project.
Based on such professional resources and service groups, the foundation decided to launch this “Guardians Project”. And this Project is going to:
• compile a concise but practical “Rural Kindergarten Children Protection Handbook” for preschool teachers, parents and children in rural areas;
• conduct five related public training courses for kindergarten teachers, which is totally free;
• support rural kindergartens to carry out training courses for parents in a long-term manner.;
• offer relief funds for rural kindergartens and children in special difficulties.
The “Guardians Project” team has successively received applications from more than sixty principals of rural kindergartens. These kindergartens are located in fourteen provinces across the country, most of which are major labor-exporting provinces. By reviewing the application materials one by one, qualified kindergartens were selected from the aspects of recruitment criteria, content of application materials, and their education concepts, and finally 47 rural kindergarten principals successfully joined. Among these kindergartens, private ones account for 75%, the total number of children covered is 6710, and the proportion of left-behind children is about 45%. We sincerely hope that through our joint efforts, there would be more “Guardians” of rural