News

Dear Friends of Hua Dan,

As we approach the end of the year, the Hua Dan team wishes you health, prosperity and happiness for the coming year. 2012 will be the fourth year of our Sichuan Children’s Programme, initiated in 2008 as a response to the earthquake and still helping people to rebuild their lives.

For the last four years, we have been conducting after-class drama activities to help children regain self-confidence, as well as summer and winter camps with teachers and parents. In this newsletter, the last in a short series, Hua Dan’s Sichuan Programme manager Jinlian shares with us how Hua Dan has transformed her life, and gives us the latest updates on the Sichuan programme, still running despite the cold weather!

Help Jinlian and the Sichuan team continue their good work by donating to support the Sichuan Programme!

The Hua Dan team

Sichuan Programme update

The Hua Dan team is cooperating with Tongchang Middle School in Beichuan county to help teachers to incorporate participatory theatre in their teaching methods. Through these methods, abstract concepts such as confidence and team-work can be experienced by children in very real and concrete ways that will positively influence their behaviour and values.

In Chengdu, we are focusing on training art practitioners and trainers in participatory arts theatre methods, so that they can improve the quality of their service to their communities and schools. In addition, we conduct Children’s Programme activities.

Hua Dan stories

There are many young migrant workers who have benefited from our Migrant Training and Employment Programme and who are now helping to run our other programmes. We are now featuring their stories on our website.

Guo Jinlian, Sichuan Children’s Programme Project Manager

“Nothing is impossible, just try it!” When I first joined Hua Dan, these words were the ones that impressed me the most. I tended to think too much, hesitate, and this could weaken the impact of my work. After I graduated from university in 2008, I joined Hua Dan first as a volunteer and now as the Sichuan Children’s Programme Project Manager.

Over the last three years, I have learned a lot and grown in confidence; I am more flexible and my passion for drama keeps growing! By participating in Hua Dan’s drama workshops, people are able to discover their hidden talents and face life challenges with a more relaxed and creative attitude.

Through each workshop I lead, I witness, again and again, the incredible transformation that happens inside the children. Abstract concepts such as confidence and teamwork can be experienced by children in very real and concrete ways that will influence their behaviors and values. We need your support to continue to bring more joy to the Sichuan school!

For 1000 RMB (US$150 / EUR 120), you can support a migrant child to watch a performance and participate in six workshops run by Jinlian and the Hua Dan team in Sichuan.

Ways you can help

Donate to Hua Dan

Donations can be made through Ammado, PayPal, or directly to our Hong Kong HSBC bank account.

Volunteer for Hua Dan

We need volunteers to help our facilitators run the workshops. Fluency in Chinese required. In addition, we always need volunteers to help with translation, especially Chinese to English.

If you are interested, please fill in our online form.

Buy our consulting products

Once again, one of the ways in which you can both help Hua Dan and improve your staff performance is by purchasing our Consulting Programme workshops. These exciting workshops can offer opportunities for your staff to not only engage with the work of Hua Dan on the field, but can also provide an innovative entertainment option for your corporate event or create opportunities for you to develop a great corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy. All proceeds from the trainings support Hua Dan’s own work with migrant worker communities.

If you are interested in more information about our Consulting Programme, please contact us via our website, or contact Pauline Bandelier (International Development Officer) directly at pauline@hua-dan.org.

Dear Friends of Hua Dan,

We hope you are enjoying a wonderful holiday season with your loved ones. Throughout this special time, we will keep sharing with you the Hua Dan miracles: the stories of Hua Dan’s facilitators — migrant workers who have become actors for hope and change in their communities.

In this newsletter, you will discover the special stories of Zhong Na and Luo Jinqiang. We hope that they will inspire you to support us, through your donations, to continue to train more facilitators to join our team.

See below for details of our consulting products and donations to Hua Dan.

The Hua Dan team

Hua Dan stories

There are many young migrant workers who have benefited from our Migrant Training and Employment Programme and who are now helping to run our other programmes. We are now featuring their stories on our website.

Zhong Na, Children’s Programme facilitator

“If you were a boy, you could join the army.” Every time I heard my father’s voice and looked at his solemn face, I felt scared and helpless knowing I was such a disappointment to him. At school, the situation was also difficult. I had trouble concentrating, especially during science class! My fear of being mocked by the other children also prevented me from taking any initiative.

I came to Beijing when I was 21 and worked as a housekeeper and waitress. I had always dreamed of being a teacher, but my limited education meant this dream was unlikely to ever come true. That day when I saw Caroline on the CCTV programme “Women Hold Up Half the Sky” changed my life.

Inspired by her enthusiasm and warmth, I started to attend Hua Dan workshops. In this atmosphere of mutual respect and equality, I began to express my thoughts in front of everyone and started to uncover my hidden talents and abilities. At Hua Dan, I received training to become a drama teacher and today my dream has come true! After five years working for Hua Dan in Beijing, my aspiration is now to go back to Shandong and share what I have learned by conducting Hua Dan projects in the local schools. Hua Dan has filled me with love and warmth, and I now feel confident I can share this love with others through my work. I feel so lucky to have this opportunity to continue to spread Hua Dan’s values in my work and my life!

(Can’t view the video? You can also watch Zhong Na on YouKu.)

For 10,000 RMB (US$1,500 / EUR 1,200), you can support Zhong Na to go back to Shandong and start setting up a Hua Dan programme in her village school.

Luo Jinqiang, Children’s Programme facilitator

From third grade — when I started to attend a school for children of migrant workers — until I graduated from high school, I attended classes taught by Hua Dan. Before beginning these class, I didn’t know that it was possible to learn through participatory theatre methods, in a relaxed way, while sharing my thoughts and experience with others.

I learned a lot, and later was given the opportunity to join the Hua Dan team. Working together, learning together, helping migrant children discover their potential has brought me so much happiness and pride! I believe that what we do is very useful for these children. In most cases the problem is not that they don’t study well, but that the current education methods are too rigid and do not allow children to think for themselves.

The Children’s Programme we run in migrant schools help them to explore new methods of apprenticeship, and to experiment with their creativity while learning about the importance of team work. Hua Dan brings so much joy and transformation to the children and their communities; I look forward to being able to run a new children programme.

(Can’t view the video? You can also watch Liu Jinqiang on YouKu.)

For 2500 RMB (US$400 / EUR 300), you can support a migrant child to participate in Beijing’s Winter Camp run by Luo Jinqiang.

Ways you can help

Donate to Hua Dan

Donations can be made through Ammado, PayPal, or directly to our Hong Kong HSBC bank account.

Volunteer for Hua Dan

We need volunteers to help our facilitators run the workshops. Fluency in Chinese required. In addition, we always need volunteers to help with translation, especially Chinese to English.

If you are interested, please fill in our online form.

Buy our consulting products

Once again, one of the ways in which you can both help Hua Dan and improve your staff performance is by purchasing our Consulting Programme workshops. These exciting workshops can offer opportunities for your staff to not only engage with the work of Hua Dan on the field, but can also provide an innovative entertainment option for your corporate event or create opportunities for you to develop a great corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy. All proceeds from the trainings support Hua Dan’s own work with migrant worker communities.

If you are interested in more information about our Consulting Programme, please contact us via our website, or contact Pauline Bandelier (International Development Officer) directly at pauline@hua-dan.org.

Dear Friends of Hua Dan,

At this special time of year, our hearts are filled with gratitude for the generous support of our donors and volunteers. In particular, we extend our sincere thanks to our most recent donors, the Chen Yet-Sen Foundation, Xin Gong Min, Beijing Improv and PCD.

Thanks to their contributions, Hua Dan will start a new children’s project in Beijing in January 2012, offering drama and film workshops to more than three hundred children over the course of one year.

In this newsletter we are highlighting two key aspects of our work:

• Firstly, our Consulting Programme — a way in which you can both help Hua Dan and improve your staff performance. These exciting workshops offer opportunities for your staff to engage with the work of Hua Dan in the field. All proceeds from the trainings support Hua Dan’s own work with migrant worker communities. See below for details of some of the different products we offer.

• Secondly, we are profiling some of the stories of Hua Dan’s migrant worker facilitators. A core part of Hua Dan’s model is the training of migrant workers to incubate and lead our projects in the communities with other migrant workers and children. In the coming weeks, we will be sharing with you some of these stories, as well as seeking your support to continue to train more facilitators to join our team.

Join Hua Dan in its efforts to bring positive transformation inside China’s migrant communities and contribute to a more stable and fair development for all!

Donations can be made through Ammado, PayPal, or directly to our Hong Kong HSBC bank account.

Wishing all of you the very best for the coming year!

The Hua Dan team

Consulting Programme workshops

Mobile Theatre

Hua Dan helps you to spread your ideas. We gather what your company has to say in terms of social responsibility and carry these ideas into communities by performing them as a piece of drama, supporting your aim of enhancing society.

Community Theatre

We provide “volunteer service” projects for your company staff. We give your personnel the opportunity to contribute to society via Hua Dan’s community work. We help you to realize your goal of social responsibility and to raise your staff’s social awareness. Each project is accompanied by a Hua Dan theatre workshop.

Transforming Theatre

Our professional and international theatre troupe provides short or long term theatre trainings for your business. We improve your company’s capability of communicating, creating, team working and personal leadership and discover new problem solving opportunities for you. This is combined with effective consulting and evaluation services.

Conference Theatre

We transform your conference topic into a drama performance and put it on stage. We provide a workshop based on participatory theatre and authentic performances in order to improve your conference’s workflow and create team building opportunities.

Hua Dan stories

There are many young migrant workers who have benefited from our Migrant Training and Employment Programme and who are now helping to run our other programmes. We are now featuring their stories on our website, including that of Dong Fen.

Dong Fen, Hua Dan Operations Manager

My name is Dong Fen, I come from the town of Sanbao, in the province of Yunnan. When I was a teenager, I wasn’t able to continue going to school because my family didn’t have enough money. This has always been one of my father’s biggest regrets, but I kept telling him: “Every cloud has a silver lining.”

While I was working as a beautician, I met several excellent mentors and friends, especially at Hua Dan. Hua Dan allowed me to see a world beyond that of a beautician, to understand my strengths and weaknesses, and to define my life’s goals. Hua Dan also gave me a platform to better develop my talents, allowed me to widen my experience and perspective, and provided me with the opportunity to use my skills to positively influence many young men and women like myself.

I believe that everyone’s development is highly impacted by the influence and guidance they receive. As a young woman from a small town, I have been so fortunate to have received the help and guidance of so many teachers, elders and friends on my road that enable me to become the person I am today.

Hua Dan is a very powerful organisation. Through theatre, it unearths and stimulates each person’s latent talents, and helps him or her to become an honest, courageous, innovative and confident leader

50,000 RMB (US$7,900 / EUR 6,000) will enable us to train a migrant woman to become a Hua Dan leader. Help Hua Dan empower migrant women with more opportunities.

Ways you can help

Donate to Hua Dan

Donations can be made through Ammado, PayPal, or directly to our Hong Kong HSBC bank account.

Volunteer for Hua Dan

We need volunteers to help our facilitators run the workshops. Fluency in Chinese required. In addition, we always need volunteers to help with translation, especially Chinese to English.

If you are interested, please fill in our online form.

Buy our consulting products

Once again, one of the ways in which you can both help Hua Dan and improve your staff performance is by purchasing our Consulting Programme workshops. These exciting workshops can offer opportunities for your staff to not only engage with the work of Hua Dan on the field, but can also provide an innovative entertainment option for your corporate event or create opportunities for you to develop a great corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy. All proceeds from the trainings support Hua Dan’s own work with migrant worker communities.

If you are interested in more information about our Consulting Programme, please contact us via our website, or contact Pauline Bandelier (International Development Officer) directly at pauline@hua-dan.org.

Caroline interacts with a participant on stage at the World Economic Forum 2011

As part of Caroline’s involvement with the Forum for Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum, Hua Dan was invited to deliver an interactive and participatory workshop for three hundred Young Global Leaders (YGL) at the “Summer Davos” in Dalian. The themes were moral dilemmas and values-based global leadership.

We devised a performative piece around four central, fictional characters: Mike Fields, the CEO of Snazzy Socks, a US-based clothing company; his wife, Natalie Fields, a stay-at-home-mum of three small children; Liu Laifeng, owner of a factory in China that makes socks; and Lan Lan, a young migrant woman working at the sock factory. The audience was introduced to these four characters, all of whom were facing personal and professional dilemmas in their lives.

Frozen picture of Lan Lan achieving her dreams

Following the performance, the audience members were taken to breakout rooms where they were able to meet the characters in person and learn more about their situation. Finally, participants designed Frozen Pictures, depicting their solutions to the dilemmas the characters were facing.

The workshop was well-received with participants saying it had significantly impacted their understanding of issues in China, as well as enabled them to reflect on many of their own personal and professional leadership dilemmas.

“Hua Dan’s performance was both a surprise and a revelation, ” said Grace Nicolette, 2011 Young Global Leader and co-founder of Social Venture Group. “In just a few short sketches, we in the audience learned so much, not just about the migrant issue in China, but about empathy, leadership, and the human condition. The actors in the sketches were top notch, and the multimedia effects used were powerful. I am not easily moved by performances, but I was deeply touched by this one. My mind and emotions were engaged in a deep way to consider the issues the characters faced. I would highly recommend having the stellar Hua Dan team to perform in any large gathering or function where people are trying to make a difference.”

This summer Jess and Caroline met in Edinburgh to explore the possibilities of Hua Dan taking a show to the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and onto the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, Wales.

After seven years of delivering theatre projects with and for migrant communities across Mainland China, Hua Dan now has the dream to produce an original piece of theatre, in collaboration with a team of UK-based theatre artists, for the global stage. At a time when the world is at once fascinated, scared and unsure about what role China will play in the future, Hua Dan can share the heartbeat of this vast continent, which many westerners never get to hear, through the compelling stories of today’s young, migrant workers.

These are the stories of the women who have made Hua Dan, and who are ready to reclaim “Made in China” for themselves. Hua Dan as a company of performers, grassroots educators and entrepreneurs have learnt their craft in the hinterlands of Beijing migrant schools and the post-earthquake villages of Sichuan. The team, mostly under 30, have migrated from all corners of rural China. They are radical in their ability to think out-of-the box and make theatre in any kind of space with people from all backgrounds. They have voices that were once silenced by the production line and are now ready to make a production of their own to share with the world.

If you are interested in supporting this project, or would like to know more about it, please email jess@hua-dan.org.

Pauline Bandelier and Arne Buttner

The Hua Dan team recently welcomed two new members: Pauline Bandelier, our new international development officer, and Arne Buttner, our media expert.

A Chinese language and international relations graduate in her home country of France, Pauline worked for three years at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris before coming to China in 2008. She worked for the French embassy in Beijing and for an international NGO.

Passionate about theatre, she studied drama at the University of Santa Cruz in California and is a member of Beijing Improv Bilingual Performance Group. In addition to overseeing Hua Dan’s fundraising strategy, she performed in the experiential workshop commissioned for the World Economic Forum in Dalian.

“Working for Hua Dan is giving me the opportunity to use my different interests and skills. I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to take part in a project as ambitious and professional as the one we just did in Dalian”!

Arne first came to China in 2008-2009 to take part in an exchange programme between his high school in Germany and a Chinese high school in Tongzhou. The result of this year is a Chinese vocabulary and accent local Beijingers would envy!

Following this, he went back to Germany where he worked for different film production companies.

In the summer of 2010, he interned with the film production company Sexy Beijing. As he was flipping through an expat magazine, he came across an article about Hua Dan. A year later, he joined Hua Dan thanks to a one year programme funded by the German government.

“Working for Hua Dan gives me a lot of insight into what is happening in China. My goal is to combine Hua Dan’s work with my interest in participatory media”.

In August 2011, Hua Dan’s Operations Manager Dong Fen received a Social Enterprise International Exchange Scholarship to participate in a week-long study tour in the UK. The scholarship was sponsored by the British Council with the support of the ArcelorMittal Foundation. Dong Fen shares her first impressions with us. “As part of my trip in London, I visited fourteen social enterprises, each with their own characteristics and providing different services,” explains Dong Fen.

One of the organisation she met was Watermans. This organisation provides services in London’s Borough of Hounslow, neighboring towns and communities in West London. “It made me think about Hua Dan,” said Dong Fen. “If we had an art space, we could provide female migrant workers and migrant children with a better environment for our workshops. We could invite participants and people from all walks of life to enter this space and create different possibilities.”

Warren Koehler (second from the left), Director of the London KIDS office, talking with fellow social entrepreneurs

She also visited the social enterprise KIDS, which offers services to disabled children and adolescents, such as home learning, specialist nurseries and crèches playgrounds or youth groups. In addition, KIDS supports disabled children’s families through parent partnerships, forums, and training. “This programme really got me thinking that we must consider not only our direct service recipients, but our indirect beneficiaries as well,” said Dong Fen. “Indirect beneficiaries could become direct beneficiaries. We need to have a wider and more comprehensive viewpoint when delivering our services.

“During this study tour, the giving spirit of the British people left me with a deep impression.”