Original Chinese interview byZhai Minglei, May 31 2008. Translated by Min Guo.

Jet Li:

I am a survivor of the Indonesian Tsunami. My family was on vacation in the Maldives the day when Tsunami came. The Maldives are composed of islands that are less than 1.8 meters high. During the 30 seconds of the Tsunami, sea water flooded the whole island we stayed. My little daughter was washed away; I was holding the hand of my elder daughter standing in the water with water above my ears. I felt the despair of death… Afterwards, I thought with introspection: in face of disaster, money and names are meaningless; lives are all equal. What should we – the lives that survived, do to live a meaningful life?

“Public Charity” (公业)

With the idea to set up a charity foundation, I visited and researched the NGOs and charity operations in Taiwan, India, Thailand and America. Then a special idea came to me: I wanted to set up a sustainable foundation. Why?

Perhaps you’ve noticed, the most popular response in the world to a disaster is a business/economic model, or a fashionable model. Mainstream media and newspapers start to report, people express their emotion and love in a very short time intensively. Emotions explode with intensity and foundations start to raise funds for relief. But after two weeks’, people are become more ignorant to issues relating to the disaster. In two months, people are no longer talking about the disaster. For example, we don’t know what happened to the people suffered in the snow disaster in early 2008. We don’t know if those people really get any help today.

My model is different–it is a kind of “Public Charity.” My ideal foundation is a fundamental charity facility much like the water and electricity utilities to a city. It can support a relief of a disaster for two or three years. The “public charity” is not driven by the influence of trends, but is driven by a custom of giving.

Eggs without Chicken 没有鸡也生蛋

I didn’t find the right model even after research into the current foundation models in the world. I would like to talk about my preliminary impression on global foundations. I grouped them into two types. One is “big foundation.” It uses the interest (investment income) of the fund’s endowment to provide for annual program funding. These foundations are more popular in US and usually have over hundred years’ history. They are like chicken that can lay eggs each year. The other type is regional foundations, such as Tzu Chi Foundation (慈济) from Taiwan and Christian foundations in the world. People’s religion believes are the basis of these foundations.

But both models are not going to work in China. I don’t want to complain about the regulations. Maybe the Chinese government is also considering if people will accept public foundations. I am willing to think in the shoes of the government. Anyway, the reality is: there are very few public foundations. And according to regulation, 70% of the funds must be used for relief annually, only 10% is allowed to use for profitable investment; otherwise, the legal person (法人) must pay back the loss himself/herself. As a result, the rate of growth of foundations in China is highly constrained. The regional foundations have very limited coverage in China.

My question is: can I have eggs without chicken?

One Yuan starts to spread the disease of LOVE 壹元钱启动爱的传染病

I have found this model: all from ONE.

One, is a mysterious number in China. “The Tao begot one. One begot two.”(道生一，一生二)

One Foundation is oriental.

One Foundation, One Family. The Earth is a family, the Earth is one

One foundation is beyond religion, politics, culture and language. If an alien visited the Earth, he/she would not see a specific person, but Humanity as One. So the Earth is one family. We are one, not two. We are global.

One means “from zero to one”. If “zero” is doing nothing, “one” is doing something. It is a fundamental difference. So, we are advocating each person to donate one yuan every month:

One Person + One Yuan/Month = One Family

Assume that we have 500 million cell phone users among 1.3 billion population in China. If everyone gives away 1 yuan per month, we will have 6 billion a year. If each Chinese gives away one yuan a month, we will have 15 billion a year. One yuan is not an economic liability to anyone, but it reflects the liability as a citizen to the sociality.

We don’t need money from big corporations. For example, when I visited Microsoft, they felt very relieved when I told them, “we don’t need your money.” But then I would ask them to give away 1 yuan from each employee’s monthly salary, or donate 1 percentage, or .1 percentage of the profit of selling one product.

That’s right; we are starting a movement to spread the disease of love, as a Harvard economic Professor said.

This is not an easy step in China. We want to change “do a good deed a day”(日行一善) in Chinese traditional culture into “do a good deed a month”. Of course, we won’t disagree if you want to donate 1,000 Yuan at once, but we don’t encourage it. We hope you can do it every month.

Why 1 Yuan? It is the easiest step from psychological research. Once a donor makes the first movement, he/she will be rewarded psychologically. Thus, it can cultivate our own Chinese charity culture and our citizen consciousness. We don’t want enterprises to donate too much cash each time there is a disaster. It is not sustainable.

Root in China, Help the World 立足中国, 救助全球

One foundation’s model is 1 person + 1 dollar/yuan + 1 month = 1 big family. We have invested 2 million in two years to research the right model.

During the research, we found four problems:

1. There are no NGOs with high credibility in China.
2. There is not a very transparent system in operation.
3. There is no a clear and long term vision for most NGOs.
4. There is too much hassle for a Chinese to donate.

Every step in our operation is designed to address the above problems. We have Deloitte as our global auditor. We enable donation via cellphone. We set our goal to help the global one family thus to build our credibility in public.

You are the best judge on this model. According to our research: the potential donation capability is 34 RMB/year for high school graduates, 400 RMB/year for college graduates. In the past one year, we accepted donations from 710,000 individuals of total amount 47.6 million RMB, i.e. average 65 RMB/person.

We have partners around the world. BBDO, Ogilvy, Disney…are all our partners. Our consulting firm suggested that it is acceptable for business to donate 0.1 percentages of profits psychologically. Since One Foundation was founded on April 17, 2007,there were five major disaster in the world, and we have helped them all. Root in China but help the globe, One Foundation is the only one.

Our own Rules

Maybe some people don’t understand Chinese charity system, but One Foundation is not coming (to you) to complain. We never suggest anything, never complain or criticize. We only do what need to be done. We work under the current system, that’s why we found Jet Li One Foundation Project under the name of China Red Cross. Any donation to One Foundation via Red Cross are managed by One Foundation, Red Cross can’t use a penny. But we have to get Red Cross’s consents and approval whenever we want to use the fund. It is a two-way surveillance which is designed under China’s current system. We want to cooperate with Red Cross and maintain a platform to work together.

We have 15 full time workers (13 before the earth quake). We raised 63 million RMB from over 700,000 individual and get links from over 100,000 web pages to our website. A dozen major portals, such as Tecent.com, Taobao.com and MSN Live are our partners.

In the meanwhile, One Foundation has provided a platform for 70+ grassroots NGOs to work together. We leverage our legal identity (under China Red Cross) in China to aggregate grassroots strength. Therefore, One Foundation is organized under western style rules – hard ware, but operated in Chinese style management arts – software.

What can a grassroots NGO do?

My biggest learning in Sichuan earthquake rescue on what ONE Foundation or other grassroots NGOs can do is: Helping the government in the blind spots. Governmental relief is not always detailed oriented. For example, the government might only responsible for shipping the relief materials to towns with a certain population, but not to remote smaller villages. So we organized people to carriage food and water to the remote villages. We need helps from local grassroots NGOs to accomplish this mission and they made it. I was moved by them.

Grassroots NGOs have their unique features: independent and allying. A grassroots NGO can’t be as big as giant government organization or cooperation, but need to be flexible and located wide-spread. They should not be merged. Once merged, they are no different from governmental organizations. One foundation’s role is an assistant to the government, who makes public’s voice heard as a coordinator, but not a trouble maker.

Problem in Relief 

As China has special regions for economy development (such as Shenzhen), there should be some “special regions” for commonweal. One Foundation wants to be one of these special regions. During the Sichuan earthquake relief, One foundations Project’s relationship with China Red Cross is a special case. We are under the China Red Cross HQ directly. The leaders in Red Cross are very wise and open. They accepted some of our suggestions very quickly. A privated owned foundation changed state-owned  Red Cross. But  regional Red Cross chapters are usually under double supervisions from: local government and China Red Cross HQ, which will create conflicts. For instance, China Red Cross HQ wanted to ship a batch of important relief materials to Shifang(什邡), but the province government wanted to ship them to Jiangyou (江油). At the end, local Red Cross had to follow the lead of local government. Another problem is not enough man power. For example, the traffic to our website and Red Cross website  increased 10 times on the first day after earthquake. We have the support to solve the server overload problem very quickly. But Red Cross doesn’t have the right resource to fix it,  rumor saying the site was hacked very soon.

So One Foundation never rants. If complaining helps, we will do it. Have you ever seen a situation where rants can change the system and regulation?  Rants about China have never stopped, but there are still plenty of enterprises thriving in such a problematic environment. Why some people can achieve their goals in such hard conditions?

A Global Family

The total amount of charity fund raised in China is RMB 2 billion in 2002, 10 billion in 2006 and 30 billion in 2008. But it only accounts for 0.075% of our GDP. In US, the number is several hundred billion USD, 2.75% of US GDP. Differ from other NGOs in China; we want to build a healthy recycle of fund raising and relief, we committ to a long term charity, a sustainable and responsible model.

Currently, natural disaster relief is still our number one focus. We also focus environmental protection, medical treatment, education, poverty problems. We will hold an annual global charity forum in BoAo Asia Forun forwww.boaoforum.org/. It will be like a temple fair, or a trade show, or a speed date. All we want to do is allow NGOs from the world to share their visions, and let Politian’s, entrepreneurs, managers and NGOs to meet up.

One foundation, one family. This is our vision. Not just what we say, but what we do.

 (END)

(For original Chinese interview see: http://www.1bao.org/?p=530 This English translation is adopted fromhttp://cnreviews.com/life/charity-donations/jet_li_one_foundation_chinese_ngo_spreading_the_disease_of_love_20080611.html)