The goal of the project “1kg More” is to build longterm, open-minded and systematic charity services for schools in rural China by cooperating with the community. The ultimate objective is to provide services that offer reading material, computer courses, internet access and extracurricular education for more than 5,000 schools in rural China in the next five years.

Presently, in rural areas of China there are more than 400,000 secondary and elementary schools in need of teachers, stationery, books, extracurricular education, etc., and just five percent of them receive limited service and assistance from charities. It is obviously difficult for charities that are short of resources and service capabilities to meet such an enormous demand, as people usually communicate and assist in providing the service through coordination with these charities.

To help clear this bottleneck, “1kg More” presented a new concept of charity works: to improve rural education by group collaboration, allowing the public to participate directly in charity work. “1kg More” operates a Wikipedia-like charity, as they encourage people to participate community work by DIY. For example: people would able to explore more rural schools information by organizing and participating in travel by themselves. Sharing information through the internet would attract more attention, and they could set up various groups from the “1kg More” website to providelong- term assistance to these rural schools.

In 2004, as a breakthrough point, “1kg More” launched charity travel for the public for convenient and easily accessible charity work. They urged everyone to carry a little more and visit rural schools during the journey, communicate with children, spread the awareness and share the good fortune.

By this simple approach to charity work “1kg More” achieved positive feedback and became one of the fastest-growing and most widespread NGOs in China. So far, “1kg More” has served and assisted more than 200 rural schools from the hinterland of south-west China to famous country tourist spots.

Links: www.1KG.org

"1kg More" was initiated in April 2004 by Andrew Yu (CN). Inside three years it grew into a famous nation-wide voluntary-work campaign in China, currently with volunteer teams in some 1 0 major cities. More than 2,000 volunteers work for all kinds of "1kg More" activities. Our volunteers have submitted information to our website on more than 200 rural schools. Presently, "1kg More" has three full-time members and more than 200 voluntary core members. We have set up wide cooperative relationships with both NGOs and commercial Companies. In December 2007, "1kg More" gained the support from Lenovo, the largest Computer manufacturer in China, and became one of its five model charities. In the same year we also successfully launched the Twin- Books project.