Hope for Immigrant Children on Global Youth Service Day
Today’s post comes from Jie, Marcomm Manager with HandsOn Shanghai.
The weekend of April 15-17, 2011, we celebrated the 23rd annual Global Youth Service Day (GYSD) with our volunteers. As the largest service day in the world, GYSD called more than one million youth in over 100 countries to actively make a difference in their community. Under the umbrella of GYSD, HandsOn Shanghai delivered its regular project, Basketball Club, on April 16 at 1pm at Yuying Middle School for migrant children in Shanghai.
Sports are important in life, and thanks to a talented and passionate group of student volunteers, the migrant children at Yuying School got just that!
Volunteers helped to teach and train the students at Shanghai Migrant School by giving them the opportunity to grow in character and develop important sports skills. Elyn, the project coordinator, was very thankful for all their help. She said, “Volunteers always help us to improve the quality of the children’s education. Without them, we would be nothing.”
Songmao Wang, a volunteer of ‘the Basketball Club’ who is studying in Shanghai University of Sport, explained that he chose to volunteer with HandsOn Shanghai because he wants to see what he can do to contribute to their sport education. He stated that he can commit two hours a week to train those children and he likes that he can actually be doing something meaningful rather than sitting all day at home.
Two other students from Fudan University assisted Songmao in teaching the class. They said that they first signed up to participate in this particular project because their friends asked them to do it, but that after spending time with the children they found that it is a great way to share their interests with others and have fun together.
The project was a success. Although it was raining earlier that afternoon, three volunteers delivered a fun class for all twenty students. They taught the rules of the sport, they played team-building games, and finished the afternoon with a game of basketball. The enjoyable and playful atmosphere was obvious during the whole process. The close bonding between students and volunteers was simply showed through their gestures and conversations.
Besides the Basketball Club project, there are many more projects organized regularly by HandsOn Shanghai, which benefit people and communities all over the city of Shanghai.
