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Green SOS Small Grant Fund, 2004

Region: China
Author: Li Xuan & Chu Yinghao, Green SOS
Consortium Member: Sichuan University Environmental Education Center
Status: Completed - Final Report Budget: $3300 Collected: $2400 Needs: $900
Result: To provide opportunities to student environmental groups in the western interior provinces of China, by enabling them to administer and to apply for grants for their projects
Donors: Katherine Gould-Martin, New York State [August 2003; March 2004; April 2004]; Asia Foundation [April 2004]
Comment: Green SOS has built a dynamic network of student university groups by providing grant opportunities and by creating a transparent, decentralized and accessible process.
See their Progress Report for 2003 for examples.

GreenSOS Fund - A Student-Run Initiative With a Track Record of Success

With the clear mission of promoting college student - initiated environmental protection activities in western China, GreenSOS Fund was founded in 2002 March by Chinese students and financed by ECOLOGIA. These were the first college students to develop and operate a mini-grant project for supporting the grassroots movement of student environmental groups in China. The second year of GreenSOS Fund was financed through the Virtual Foundation, with donations from private individuals and match funding from the Trace Foundation.

GreenSOS Fund is an independent project under GreenSOS, which is based in Sichuan University, in Chengdu. GreenSOS means Green Student Organizations. It started in 2001 with the mission of strengthening the network and communication of student environmental groups in China. In 2002 and 2003, the committee of GreenSOS Fund received 43 activity proposals, from Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Lanzhou, Shanxi, Guanxi, Chongqing and Anhui. There were 22 of these which received full funding or match-funding for their initiations, with an average grant $225USD for each.

Students' activities, granted by GreenSOS Fund, range from innovative community environmental education, on-site studies in natural resources protection, lighting campus in a green-minded way, environmentaly friendly consumption, and environmental issues survey of student knowledge and interest. Those activities turned out very positive effects among teenagers, highly-educated young people and decision makers for accelerating the environmental awareness movement in China.

Considering the serious lack of fund sources for student environmental activities in campus and off, especially in western China, GreenSOS Fund is playing a critical role to turn ideas into practice. Besides providing grant to student environmental activities, GreenSOS Fund also generates the following remarkable outcomes:

1. GreenSOS Fund has developed a decentralized management system: collecting, evaluating, and granting proposals, and also consulting, supervising and summarizing the implementation. This helps young people, by themselves, to develop hand-on experience in creating democratic decision systems and undertaking corresponding responsibilities. This management system, as the first student operated mini-grant project, shows a lot of strengths and some weaknesses, which are valuable lessons for other mini-grant projects in China.
2. GreenSOS Fund has rapidly created a good name among over 200 student environmental groups in China and many active international and domestic organizations.
3. GreenSOS Fund functions as a strong motivation for student environmental groups in western China to create activity plans, write applications, implement plans and summarize projects with a continuous improvement of
4. GreenSOS Fund also created an intelligent method to extend the knowledge and passions of student environmental groups’ alumni, who are selected to be committee members of GreenSOS Fund and act as local representatives to help the application, implementation and conclusion of student activities.
5. GreenSOS Fund, noticably, makes full use of its Internet website developed by GreenSOS, www.greensos.org, to publish all grant applications, activity reports and other related information. This not only helps the communication among the granted groups but also all student groups in China regarding activity design and management.

It is undoubted that the continuation of GreenSOS Fund in China will not only benefit the initiatives of student environmental activities but also contribute the development of young people with abundant environmental literacy and skills they can apply towards sustainable development today and tomorrow.

Additionally, innovative solutions for the challenge of GreenSOS Fund regarding with leadership turn over, like every student group, could be created only if GreenSOS Fund could be run in a long term basis. Now GreenSOS Fund is looking forward to having its financial support, $3300USD, for providing mini-grants to at least 10 students environmental protection related activates within western China in 2004.

Many thanks for your kind support to turn the ideas of student initiated environmental activities into practice in Western China. Your donation to a group of green-minded young people in China is actually an investment to our common future - sustainable society.

Budget

Mini-Grants to student organizations	$2500
Publicity, Evaluation/Selection, Final Report compilation and translation	$250
Operation of Green SOS Fund (administration, communications, etc.)	$250
Virtual Foundation administrative fee	$300
Total requested from Virtual Foundation	$3300