CYOT被China Daily报道了！为坚持公益的大家点赞！

"In a world where talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not, CYOT is fighting to rebalance the odds and give every young person a fair chance to realize their dreams."

编辑：ZC

排版：小鱼

2020年5月20日，CYOT被China Daily报道（见China Daily 2020年5月20日第18版）。

CYOT 成立于 2019 年 1 月，截至 2020 年 2 月 已拥有 826 名志愿者，分布于全国 20 个城市。CYOT 集结了社会不同行业领域的贤达才士，致力于增进跨行业交流与铸就全域视野及促成个体精进与实现社会价值的协同并进，发起了 “鸿鹄领袖公益计划”、线上课程（大咖客厅及干货云课堂）、人物访谈、线下交流活动等公益项目，谋求中国的青年与青年的中国的共同发展，打造了一个高质深度的交流平台。

今年CYOT的两大公益项目“ CYOT鸿鹄计划”和“CYOT青蓝计划”也即将启动，共同致力于消除教育资源不平等及提升阶层流动性，欢迎各位有志青年报名参加！

China Daily报道全文如下：

Giving students a sense of possibility

By Xing Wen | China Daily | Updated: 2020-05-20 

Student beneficiaries of China Youth of Tomorrow take part in a language partner program co-organized by the nonprofit last year.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Nonprofit shows how dreams and ambitions can be achieved by those with limited resources, Xing Wen reports.

The past, it is said, can resemble another country. For Zhao Ya, her childhood seemed like another continent. A television set in her neighbor's home in her isolated village in southwestern China where she lived, and its flickering grainy images, provided the only opening to the outside world.

Her farmer parents were poor and Zhao used to leave their meager bungalow early in the morning to walk a rugged mountain path for some 40 minutes every day to attend primary school classes. After school she helped with household chores. One day she saw something on TV that changed her life.

"Our bungalow home didn't even have running water or a proper bathroom, but on TV there was a splendid penthouse in New York with a swimming pool," recalls Zhao. It was a moment of liberation-she realized life could be so much better.

Today, the 32-year-old has actually made it happen. Zhao has become fluent in English, Spanish, German and French, visited more than 80 countries, and has hobbies that include playing the ukulele, paragliding, diving and doing the tango.

She knows how hard it is for someone from an economically disadvantaged family to succeed.

"The only way for me to strive for a better life was by obtaining an education. However, with little guidance from my parents, I had to steer myself in the academic world on my own," says Zhao.

She wanted to help others and joined up with a couple of friends last spring and co-founded the China Youth of Tomorrow, a nonprofit social enterprise that aims to serve ambitious students from low-income families, who are called "first-generation college students".

The organization has launched projects that offer free professional and personal development training sessions, one-on-one mentorship and a robust network within its community to help these first-generation college students-especially those from rural areas.

Over the past year, more than 500 volunteers from top universities or renowned companies have reached out to those students.

"From my own experience, I realized how you unfold the future has a lot to do with who you meet," she says.

There were two particular "mentors" for Zhao, her head teacher in high school and the boss of a media company where she did an internship in her junior year in college.

In 2005, Zhao entered a high school in Chongqing where she gradually developed an interest in writing. Then she proposed to the head teacher that she wanted to set up a literature club.

"I thought the head teacher would turn me down, as the school usually put our academic performance first rather than hobbies, but to my surprise, my teacher encouraged and supported me," she recollects.

The club, soon after its birth, attracted more than 400 student members. Zhao regularly ran reading salons among schoolmates and made newspaper-styled collections of the articles written by club members. "As I prepared for the club activities, I grew to be increasingly confident and more effective at execution," she says.

After becoming an English major at a college in Fuzhou, East China's Fujian province, the dream of studying abroad germinated in her mind. However, she was well aware that it was impossible for her family to afford it.

Zhao decided to place the idea in cold storage until the media company boss suggested that she could apply for a job overseas.

She was encouraged to send job application emails to as many companies as possible and, in early 2011, she finally got an offer from a winery in France, where she ended up working for the following eight years.

Zhao was later appointed as a marketing manager to help expand the winery's market in Asia.

In 2013, she won the opportunity to be sponsored by her employer to study a two-year MBA program at the University of Strasbourg.

So thereafter, Zhao not only became the first one in her family to earn a college degree, but also the first one in the whole village to study abroad.

"I think that finding inspiring mentors is crucial for one's development," says Zhao. "Without their direction, it was hard for me to grasp chances and climb the career ladder."

Xue Guofang, 22, studies international financial law at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and is a beneficiary of the one-on-one mentorship program.

Speaking of the vital help from her mentor, Xue says: "I wasn't certain about what kind of career I wanted to pursue and also failed to spot my priorities. My mentor patiently analyzed the pros and cons of different paths I might choose, until I became very clear that I wanted to be an international arbitration lawyer."

Students attend a training course.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Xue grew up in a family of migrant workers in Shanghai and went to a primary school in the city. But she also spent part of her middle school years back in her home village in Chongqing, Southwest China.

The sharp contrast between the Shanghai-based school and the village school made her fully realize the difference between urban and rural areas.

"In the village school, a classroom with only one electric fan was packed with more than 80 students," she recalls.

Later, as a first-generation college student from a low-income family, she says it was hard for her to catch up with her peers from well-off families.

Unlike students from these families, for example, Xue says, she had to do several part-time jobs to cover tuition fees for English debate training courses, as well as for travel and accommodation when their debate team attends competitions in other cities or countries.

Although she is proud of herself and her achievements, sometimes she would inevitably feel inferior and frustrated due to her tight budget.

Things changed for the better after she applied for the project.

More opportunities

Apart from the mentorship program, Xue can also have access to a career development curriculum available online, listen to inspiring speeches delivered by well-established figures and attend forums that are regularly held to gather Chinese and foreign students together to discuss certain topics.

She says that her communication skills have been greatly improved and that she's no longer afraid of conducting face-to-face discussions with key players.

"I'm considerably motivated by the many outstanding and hardworking volunteers I met at China Youth of Tomorrow, who are also from low-income families," says Xue. "They can embrace a glittering career and help others, and I'm convinced I can follow their path."

The organization also helps these students to select and apply for their ideal foreign universities.

On Feb 17, an email brought Zhang Yingxin, a 22-year-old senior at Northeast Electric Power University, the good news that she had successfully applied for the postgraduate program in multidisciplinary gender studies at the University of Cambridge.

Domestic violence had been part of her upbringing. It spurred her to focus on gender studies in the hope of liberating rural Chinese women's minds and reducing the number of domestic violence victims.

Raised in a farming family in a poverty-stricken village of Shandong province, Zhang and her elder sister saw firsthand how dreadful domestic violence can be.

After she got to university and talked with her peers about it, their astonished faces made her realize just how outrageous the abuse was. She started to reflect on her past. The idea of pursuing feminism-related studies and defending rural women's rights in the future was then well and truly seeded.

Last June, she turned to the nonprofit's volunteers for advice. A graduate from University of Cambridge recommended that she apply for the master's course of multidisciplinary gender studies there and guided her in preparing the necessary application materials.

"The volunteer gave me many useful suggestions, such as how to write a more logical research proposal and how to highlight my strengths in a personal statement," she says.

Recently, the organization also helped Zhang win over the scholarship from China Scholarship Council to ensure that she could go for further study in London without financial worries.

"It's so touching that all volunteers from the organization are willing to help me without asking for any reward," she says. "I hope one day I can also help others in some way or another like they do.

"I believe we can contribute to society to make an impact that matters."

First-generation college attendees can face varying degrees of success

By Xing Wen | China Daily | Updated: 2020-05-20

Three of the co-founders of the nonprofit China Youth of Tomorrow socialize with friends at an event in Shanghai last year.[Photo provided to China Daily]

It is one of the metrics, a signpost of progress in an improving economy and society-children getting the opportunity of going to college, an opportunity their parents did not have. "First-generation college students" refers to university-bound children from a family where neither of the parents could benefit from higher education.

According to the Chinese College Student Survey issued last year by the Institute of Education under Tsinghua University, from 2011 to 2018, more than 70 percent of all freshmen in China each year were from families without a history of college attendance.

Among this student population, more than 69.74 percent came from rural areas, 70 percent have siblings and many of their parents didn't even receive a high school education.

For children to attend college, when their parents did not have a chance to, is a moment to cherish and feel proud of, but there are challenges.

This group of first-generation college students are commonly from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Only 45 percent or so of them studied in key high schools at, or above, municipal level and nearly 63 percent have chosen to study the sciences as they thought job prospects were better.

By contrast, less than 6 percent chose to major in an arts-related field, which generally requires a higher level of cultural capital and financial muscle, especially from the student's family.

The survey also found that this group of students aren't as likely to actively express their viewpoint, seek support from teachers or peers, or get involved in social events outside classrooms.

These students often have to take up part-time work to help pay their way and, when they leave college, they want to work and get an income straight away to help their families rather than seek more education.

Xia Ye, 31, co-founder of China Youth of Tomorrow, a nonprofit social enterprise that aims to help ambitious students from low-income families, has been thinking about how to improve educational equality in society.

"My father, once a first-generation college student, has told me how hard it was for him, the son of two farmers, to enter a university and navigate through unfamiliar academic and social situations," Xia says.

Born into a well-off family in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, Xia admits that she herself is a beneficiary of the cultural and social capital possessed by her parents and also an observer of educational stratification-for example, it's relatively easier for students from well-to-do families to apply for top-ranking universities overseas, but this ambition is generally out of reach for their peers from modest or poverty-stricken families.

Enjoying adequate familial and social support, more affluent students participate in international competitions, take internships in leading companies and do other things to package their resumes in a manner that attracts world-class universities.

"At this point, I think it's a priority to give students a broader range of useful information that would help them to get access to a valuable internship and other social activities," Xia says.

Hence, the nonprofit, China Youth of Tomorrow, has invited seasoned educators and senior managers to extend this group's source of useful information to equip them with more eye-catching accomplishments conducive to their future development.

Xia used to study law at the East China University of Political Science and Law, where her grade was below the average of her college roommates.

Interestingly, Xia is the one who later successively got into Boston University, acted as a civil servant for the local government in Boston, worked for a top law firm in China and ran a lucrative business in Shanghai, while most of her peers chose to take a stable job with lower income after graduation.

"That's because their families were unable to afford for them to study abroad," Xia explains.

To close the gap, Xia says proper mentorship is necessary for these students, helping them to find out what kind of job they sincerely want to embark upon and map out the corresponding career path for them. This way, maybe these students won't make career decisions that they will one day regret.

When working on the nonprofit's charity projects, Xia noticed, surprisingly, that a few students who applied for the projects seldom attended debates and other activities held by the organization.

"Initially, I was a bit angry, wondering why they wasted the opportunities with which they could improve themselves," Xia recalls.

After a heart-to-heart conversation, she found out that it was because they had low self-esteem and a lack of confidence, as no one had ever told them before that they were talented or useful or interesting. They held the idea that they didn't deserve the attention of so many volunteers in the nonprofit, nor the patient instructions from mentors who are often well-established figures.

"I've learned a lot from the experience," says Xia.

"I realized that we project initiators should be approachable and better connected with those young students, encouraging them to open themselves up to the outside world."

报道链接：

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202005/20/WS5ec47f6da310a8b241156e60.html
https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202005/20/WS5ec47f4fa310a8b241156e5b.html

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