The Amity Foundation

Amity Bakery makes pizza-sized mooncake

The Amity Bakery in Nanjing is churning out top-quality mooncakes, the traditional speciality for Mid-Autumn Day, which this year will be celebrated on 3 October.

The Bakery is part of the Amity Home of Blessings. It has recently started producing mooncakes under the guidance of Mr. Kwong, a Hong Kong-based master baker and volunteer for Amity. To mark the occasion, Mr. Kwong made a special mooncake, which at 8 inches (20 cm) in diameter is several times the size of ordinary mooncakes.

Master Baker Kwong presents his creation

Demand for the mooncakes, which are filled with cashew nuts and other delicacies and inscribed with Amity’s Chinese name “Ai De”, is already strong in the run-up to Mid-Autumn Day. This is the second-most important holiday and family event in the Chinese world, after Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), and reaches back at least 3000 years.

Several thousand mooncakes are expected to be sold at the Amity Bakery over the course of the coming weeks. Making good mooncakes is no mean feat: It requires special skills as well as experience and great manual dexterity.

Amity Newsletter: “Reconstruction”

The latest issue of the Amity Newsletter (ANL) has just been published online (the printed edition will be mailed to subscribers soon). This issue, focussing on reconstruction, contains:

• an article on social cohesion – Amity’s efforts to rebuild communities and individual lives, not just houses
• an interview with Amity General Secretary Qiu Zhonghui
• an essay by a young girl from Woyun Village in the Sichuan earthquake region
• personal reflections of Amity staffers on their work in Woyun after the earthquake
• Amity’s principles for post-disaster work and the latest numbers of our relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts
• an article on how people’s views, attitudes and personal relationships have changed since the earthquake
• a portrait of a Hong Kong engineer volunteering in Woyun
• and latest news

Complete ANL issues can also be downloaded as PDF files.

Principles of Post-Disaster Work

Our disaster relief and reconstruction principles, together with the latest figures of expenses for Amity’s work in the Sichuan earthquake region, can be downloaded here (PDF – please click on the image). This document highlights how beneficiaries are selected, the emphasis put by Amity on beneficiaries’ participation, how we monitor our project work and how we select our partners. Between May 2008 and June 2009, Amity has allocated a total of CNY 24,455,768 to the Sichuan earthquake projects.

Flutists help orphans

Linda Mintener, of the First Baptist Church in Madison, Wisconsin (USA), and Amity long-term teacher Judy Sutterlin presented a compact disc with fine flute music to Ms. She Hongyu of the Amity Foundation. The presentation took place on 7 July during the conference of SEP teachers. The compact disc has an interesting story.

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Self-regulation document issued

At the Private Foundation Forum, which was held in Beijing on 2 and 3 July, a “Self-Discipline Declaration of China Private Foundations” was issued. It is a fundamental document for the self-regulation of foundations in China, based on the “Self-discipline Guidelines of China’s Non-profit Organisations”. The Amity Foundation is one of the four organisations which developed these guidelines.

The full text of the “Self-Discipline Declaration of China Private Foundations” is available on the Hauser Center and China Development Brief websites (English, Chinese).

Emergency Appeal for Flood Victims

Heavy rain has led to catastrophic floods in Southern China since the end of June. As of 5 July, more than 39 million people had been affected, with 75 dead and 13 missing. The provinces of Guangxi, Jiangxi, Hunan and Hubei were hit hardest by the disaster.

Please make a donation now!

We are hoping for your support of our relief efforts:

• CNY 50 (US$ 7.30) will pay for blankets for a whole family
• CNY 60 (US$ 8.80) will pay for enough food for one person for a whole month
• CNY 90 (US$ 13.20) will pay for a month’s ration of cooking oil for one family
• CNY 110 (US$ 16.10) will pay for a rainproof tarpaulin (80 square meters)
• CNY 160 (US$ 23.40) will pay for a quilt
• CNY 220 (US$ 32.20) will pay for a set of clothes for one person
• CNY 2200 (US$ 322) will pay for material needed by one rural family to resumeagricultural production (seeds, fertiliser etc.)
• CNY 11,000 (US$ 1610) will support the reconstruction of a family home

Please make a donation now!

SigAm bilingual deaf education conference

Bilingual deaf education is one of the most advanced concepts in special education world-wide. The Amity Foundation, in cooperation with the Norwegian Signo Foundation, has pioneered its adoption in China, first under a pilot project starting in 1996 and later on a broader basis. Today, bilingual deaf education is used at four special education facilities in Jiangsu Province: the Suzhou School for the Blind and Deaf, the Changzhou School for the Deaf, the Yangzhou Special Education School and the Zhenjiang Special Education Centre. Since 2006 this concept has spread further west, to the provinces of Guizhou and Sichuan.

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Woyun’s “wells of happiness”

Amity’s local office in Woyun Village near Mianzhu, Sichuan Province, recently finished a drinking water project. 12 wells have been restored to good working order, corroded pipes have been replaced in 7 places, 3 new pumps have been installed.

The earthquake of May 2008 not only led to the collapse of well shafts and damaged pipes, it also changed groundwater levels all over the region.

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