Friends World Program of Long Island University

Internship Opportunities

Internships in China

Students at the China Center can arrange internships for credit. As is the case with an independent study projects, most students are too busy in the fall semester to participate, so most internship projects are carried out in the spring semester, or during a student's third semester in the fall, after students have completed the required core curriculum and have the requisite foundation in Chinese language. In addition, it can be difficult to arrange social welfare internships with a Chinese governmental work unit, due to the language restrictions and the sensitive nature of such work, but students have had success volunteering with International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGO) or nonprofit organizations in Hangzhou and Shanghai.

Students in the past have had success working for the following organizations:

In Touch Zhejiang
In Touch Zhejiang is a monthly English language publication sponsored by the Zhejiang Provincial Government's Information Office and published by the Hong Kong Economic and Information Agency. Friends World students in the past have written feature articles for In Touch Zhejiang on Zhejiang's culture, art, history, and travel destinations and the new editor invites Friends World students to also participate in internships for credit.

China Charities Federation
China Charities Federation is a national organization established in 1994 under the Ministry of Civil Affairs. The Federation began raising funds for disaster relief and social welfare projects, but has since ventured into education, water supply, health and poverty alleviation sectors. It has a federal structure with over ninety affiliated city and provincial level member charity foundations. These organizations have provided disaster relief, corrective surgery for orphans with cleft lips and palates, institutional provision for children of imprisoned parents, and improved facilities for elderly assisted care institutions. In addition, the China Charities Federation has sponsored projects that include drinking water and irrigation projects in arid areas of western China (1995), the Love Project for rural school construction and renovation (1996), and the Cancer Rehabilitation Project (1999). China Charities Federation collaborates with a wide range of international organizations, including Oxfam Hong Kong, Smile Train, Philip Hayden Foundation, and Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Foundation.

Gift of Life Shanghai
The Gift of Life Shanghai (GOLF) is a community service program of the Provisional Rotary club of Shanghai and sponsors children in need of open-heart surgery. The surgeries are performed at the Shanghai Chest Hospital, Pediatric Cardiac Clinic.

Hands On
Hands On Shanghai was founded by a group of young professionals who wanted to become more involved in the Shanghai community. Their purpose is to serve as a volunteer clearinghouse for existing organizations, and implementing new long and short-term projects in the community to service the needs of residents based on the interests of the volunteers through partnerships with local charitable organizations.

LifeLine Shanghai
LifeLine Shanghai is a non-profit organization affiliated with and accredited by Lifeline International, a worldwide organization with representation in twenty-two countries and a corps of volunteers totaling more than 30,000, funded in part by the World Health Organization. LifeLine Shanghai is the first confidential support service for foreigners in Shanghai. Launched in March, 2004, this anonymous telephone hotline provides Shanghai’s international community with easy access to effective and confidential counseling, crisis intervention, and information.

River of Hearts
River of Hearts is a charity organization that collects donations of new and used clothes, shoes, toys and bedding and distributes these to affiliated charities or organizations in need, such as orphanages, school, and elderly assisted care centers. River of Hearts is affiliated with the Shanghai Community Center, which is located in the Pudong district of Shanghai and was formed by expatriates wishing to contribute to the surrounding Chinese community.

YMCA Hangzhou
The first YMCA in China was originally established in Fujian province in 1885 and was active in literacy and vocational education. The original YMCA closed during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and later reopened in 1980, focusing since then on providing social and educational services, and recreational and cultural programs. The central YMCA office is based in Shanghai, with local branch offices in Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Tainjin, Xiamen, Xi'an, and Hangzhou. The first YMCA in Hangzhou was established in the earlier 20th century, and although it too closed during the Cultural Revolution, it reopened in the early 1980s and since then has provided extracurricular activities for youth, music and dance classes for adults, and employment training classes and stipends for unemployed workers. It also operates various community centers in retirement communities.

Operation Smile
Operation Smile was founded Dr. William P. Magee, a plastic surgeon, and his wife, Kathleen Magee, a nurse and clinical social worker, in 1982. Volunteers repair childhood facial deformities such as oral clefts while building public and private partnerships that advocate for sustainable healthcare systems for children and families, coordinating more than twenty-five medical mission sites in twenty-four countries each year. In 2005, medical volunteers provided free surgeries for 8,359 children through international and local, in-country medical missions. The headquarters for the China region is located in Hangzhou.

The first mission to China was in 1991, and since then there have been over sixteen medical missions here: Beijing; Dujiangyan in Sichuan; Hangzhou in Zhejiang; Harbin in Heilongjiang; Kunming in Yunnan; Lanzhou in Gansu; Linyi and Qingdao in Shandong; Meizhou, Shantou, Zhaoqing and Zhongshan in Guangdong; Nanchang in Jiangxi; Nanjing in Jiangsu; Wuhan in Hubei; and Xi'an in Shanxi.

The recent film by Jeffrey Kramer, Smile (2005) is a melodramatic but well-intended movie based on the actual experience of the director's daughter, a high school student who volunteered for Operation Smile near Shanghai (see Recommended films set in or near Hangzhou here).

Amity Foundation
Based in Nanjing, the Amity Foundation is an independent Chinese voluntary organization, created in 1985 on the initiative of Chinese Christians to promote education, social services, health, and rural development in China, from the coastal provinces in the east to the minority areas in the west. The Amity Foundation organizes Service Learning Projects, blindness prevention projects in the countryside, medical training for rural minorities, relief work for natural disasters, rural development projects, and social welfare projects for children with special needs.

English Training Program (ETP) for Tibetan Students
ETP is much more than and English Training Program. The brightest students are recruited from various secondary schools in some of the poorest Tibetan regions of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces to attend a three-year English program in the Nationalities Department of Qinghai Normal University in Xining, where ethnically Tibetan students are given the opportunity to learn English with native speakers from the United States and Europe.

The program is directed by Dr. Kevin Stuart, who has designed a very successful and unique approach to teaching English as a second language. As a testament to this success, students with no prior competency in the language are routinely able to read and comprehend novels by Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck after only two years of study and after three years some of the best students in the program go on to attend university abroad, including departments at Charles University, in Prague, and Kansas University, Reed College, and Duke University in the United States.

In addition to English language skills, students are encouraged to learn the organizational skills necessary to design and manage rural development and cultural preservation projects through small-scale, grassroots sustainable development projects in their local communities. Students learn how to identify community needs, draft promising proposals, target funding agencies, manage and evaluate their own projects. Previous projects range from providing solar cookers to building village schools and community bridges. These projects have received funding from United Board, Trace Foundation (New York City), The Bridge Fund (San Francisco) and the Ford Foundation.

Students are also encouraged to become involved in the cultural preservation of their local communities through ethnographic audio and video documentation, and transcription of local Tibetan colloquial dialects using collection in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and translation into English. Interested students are also encouraged to become involved with cultural preservation.

Friends world students are encouraged to help ETP students with fundraising, including editing funding proposals and reports, and ethnographic studies and biographies.

Kham Kampo Association (KKA)
Named for the sacred Kampo mountain located in Lithang County in the south of Gartze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Kham, KKA is an NGO dedicated to improving the living condition of remote Kham Tibetan areas through local small-scale development projects with a particular interest in health care, cultural preservation, education, environmental conservation, school libraries, and reducing the work associated with fuel collection. The goal of KKA is to improve living conditions in the poorest and remotest Tibetan areas by cooperating with different organizations, charities, and individuals.

Gui'de County Middle School
In Gui'de County, Qinghai Province, there are two Tibetan boarding schools, Dongge and Dongchey Junior Middle schools seeking native English teachers. The later school is supported by the Italian NGO, ASIA, and has occasionally received native English speakers in the past and the headmaster speaks excellent English. The school at Dongge, which is very near nomadic areas, is smaller with only four English teachers, only one of whom is Tibetan, but she is reputed to be a dynamic young woman who would very much like to collaborate with a native English teacher. The nomadic school at Tongmer, which is one of the feeder schools for Dongge, has also received native English speaking teachers in the past. Please see this site by Jim Gourley for photographs of the Tongmer school.

Interested Friends World students would receive training for one or two weeks in teaching English as a Second Language at the Gui'de County Tibetan Middle School (GCTMS), the only senior middle school in the county for which these are feeder schools, with an experienced American English teacher. You would then collaborate with local Tibetan instructors teaching oral English at one of the two Junior Middle Schools. Both schools are less than four hours by bus from the provincial capital of Xining. The junior middle school level is a critical time for Tibetan students, since this is when they often abandon hope for learning English. Be warned that these locations are remote and the facilities at these schools are basic, both lacking running water, and the environment extreme, but the experience will be rewarding, unique and memorable. Three-month commitment preferred.

United Nations Development Programme
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) China Internship Program in Beijing offers a small group of outstanding university students and graduates the opportunity to acquire experience working as interns in the United Nations system. UNDP provides a compact understanding of development policies, thematic priorities, and technical cooperation activities. Interns specialize in the areas of democratic governance, sustainable environmental policies, poverty reduction, and other activities related to sustainable human development.

Interns acquire practical experience in various aspects of project management in an international working environment. Under the program, interns will work in UNDP Office and/or UNDP project office in Beijing assisting in program management, organization of workshop/seminar and preparation of briefing and information materials paper on development subjects. Interns work on a non-remunerative basis for more than one month and up to six months, part-time or full-time, and should be either a third or fourth year undergraduate student or recent university graduate with an area of concentration in a development–related field such as economics, international relations, sociology, public of business administration, political sciences or environmental studies, and possess knowledge of Chinese and Microsoft Office applications and excellent communication skills.

Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund
The Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund (TPAF) was established in Lhasa in 1998 to aid disadvantaged Tibetan families and communities and encourage their participation in the rapid expansion of Tibet's modern development in traditional ways. TPAF works to increase the incomes and improve the living standards of Tibetans through a series of programs that provide education in vocational skills in an effort to secure steady employment for Tibetans in rural and urban areas. TPAF works with local Tibetans to implement projects in the areas of microfinance, rural and urban employable skills, small enterprise development, artisan development, social welfare, village health and hygiene and AIDS/HIV awareness and prevention.

Terma Foundation
The Terma Foundation was founded by the American doctor Nancy Harris in 1993, originally as the Tibet Child Nutrition Project. Based in a small office in Lhasa, Terma has several full-time and part-time employees, many of whom are Tibetan. The Terma Foundation, aside from continuing work with child nutrition, also implements public health programs in nutrition, and primary and preventative health care delivery for indigenous peoples using traditional medical systems integrated with low-tech, lost cost Western technology when appropriate. Their initiatives emphasize the health of children, women and the elderly, implementing basic sanitation education and health screening to prevent mortality from such conditions as diarrhea, tuberculosis, rickets, dehydrations and other prevalent conditions in rural Tibet.

Royal Asiatic Society
The Royal Asiatic Society (RAS), with an institutional history over 200 years, was founded in Calcutta in 1784 as a British learned society for the study of Indian history, culture and languages. There are now eight branches around the world in London, Mumbai, Calcutta, Dhaka, Seoul, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong, where members pursue historical, linguistic, anthropological, scientific, literary, cultural, and artistic knowledge about Asia, from Turkey to Japan. The Northern China Branch of the RAS (1858—1952) was originally founded in Shanghai, and included as one of its founding presidents none other than Herbert Allen Giles, the Chinese linguist and British diplomat who later became the second professor of Chinese at Cambridge University, now remembered mostly for his contribution to the Wade-Giles Chinese phonetic transliteration system. The Vice President of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Dr. Judith Kolbas, is working together with China Center faculty, the British Council, and the Chinese Ministry of Education to officially the Northern China branch in Hangzhou. Students may conduct an internship with Vice President Kolbas, and help organize monthly lectures about Chinese history and culture for the English-speaking community in Hangzhou.

Idealist
In addition to these internship opportunities listed above, students may consult Idealist: Action without Borders. Under Resources for Volunteers, Create a Volunteer Profile or click on Volunteering Abroad; or under Advanced Search click on Volunteer Opportunities; or conduct a general search in the Idealist database for the search term "China."

You must be a logged-in China Center Student to view the specific contact information for the above organizations in the below section.

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Last updated on Jul 04, 2006