About Blessing Hands
Blessing Hands is a public charity dedicated to helping and nurturing people around the world by providing support systems and improving access to educational opportunities.
General Program Description:
Blessing Hands funds educational tuitions for students in the Yangshuo and Qinzhou areas of Guangxi Province, P. R. China, while helping stimulate international friendships. In China, children over the age of fifteen do not get educational support from the government. Junior high and high school students are usually boarding students. Girls especially are expected to work to support their family, or their brother’s education. Providing educational grants makes it possible for economically disadvantaged students to overcome the poverty that keeps them and their families trapped in cycles of want and desperation. Our children come from rural families that make a subsistence living. Many of them are orphans living with grandparents or members of single parent families. Their families, heavy with the needs of the older generation, often see them as potential immediate wage earners while they dream of being teachers, doctors, and journalists.
Governance
Blessing Hands is a 501(c)(3) public charity administered by a board of five directors under bylaws. Our headquarters is in Morehead, Kentucky, a small college town. Our founder and president is Betty Cutts, a volunteer ESL teachers, housewife, and mother. We are a faith based charity that seeks to help people help themselves and others.
Program in Yangshuo County, Guilin, Guangxi, China
Blessing Hands began in the fall of 2005 as a simple fund to provide tuition supplements for 185 primary and 31 lower middle school children in the Yangshuo County Schools, for a total of 216 children in 30 rural schools. Teachers at a 2005 summer English camp, where Betty Cutts was teaching, reported the names of students in their classes who could not afford tuition for the coming semester.
Malan Cai, a professor at Guangxi Normal University in Guilin,
China, oversaw this initial program for the Blessing Hands Fund. She
had been a visiting scholar at Morehead State University and got her
masters degree at Morehead. She handled funds and communication
between the Blessing Hands Fund and Gloria Wei, the Yangshuo
administrator for Blessing Hands, who also works for the
Yangshuo County Educational
Department; Betty Cutts knew Gloria Wei, because she was the
administrator of the 2005 summer English camp in Yangshuo where she
taught.
Betty Cutts spoke at clubs and small groups concerning the needs of these students and sent Internet reports and appeals for help for the children. There were no firm plans to incorporate or become a nonprofit charity. In January of 2006 the Chinese Government made an announcement that rural children in Western provinces under 15 years of age would receive free tuition. This change was announced to Blessing Hands donors and adjustments were made to the new situation for the children already enrolled in Blessing Hands, and high school students, who could not pay their tuition, were added to our rolls.
In late February of 2006, Founding Family Charitable Foundation gave Blessing Hands a grant of $25,000 with matching funds up to $25,000, offered until December 31, 2006. This grant came because of an e-mail that was forwarded to the Foundation by a mutual friend. With these new funds, plans were made to increase the number of Yangshuo County children receiving educational aid to 282. 104 primary students received textbooks, school supplies, and other school needs at $10 per child. 73 lower middle school children received textbooks, school supplies, and other school needs at $25 per student, and 83 higher middle school children received tuition. The total Yangshuo fall program was budgeted at $8,501. Three partial college scholarships of $500 were also budgeted for Blessing Hands graduating seniors from Yangshuo at any college where they would be accepted.
In August 2006 Betty Cutts, Malan Cai, and Nina Ottinger of the Founding Family Foundation were in Yangshuo to observe the Blessing Hands educational aid program, conduct well child physicals (Nina is a nurse practitioner), and assist with an eyeglass clinic for our students and Yangshuo teachers. A team of six Americans participated in the eye clinic that was a cooperative effort involving the People’s Hospital of Yangshuo, Sister Cities of Morehead, and Blessing Hands.
Blessing Hands Internship
In the summer of 2007, our first intern, Megan Mraz from Morehead State University, will spend two weeks in Yangshuo. She will participate in a Friendship Art Day where our Blessing Hands students will create individual paintings that will be entered in an art show in Morehead, KY in the fall of 2007. The winning painting of that show will be entered in the Sister Cities International Young Artist Competition in 2008. Megan will also participate in a Sports Day and visit the schools, which will become Sister Schools to American schools, to take pictures and deliver gifts. When she returns to campus in the fall, she will advocate for our Blessing Hands students and speak in area schools. She will stay with a local family while she is in Yangshuo.
Qinzhou County, Guangxi Province, P. R. China
When the Founding Family Charitable Foundation grant was awared, a large portion was allocated to the Qinzhou area. The rural schools around Qinzhou City lack the resources of the city schools, and all schools that serve the higher middle school students have to charge tuition, since the government does not pay tuition for students over 15 years of age. Betty Cutts taught Middle school teachers in a summer English camp in Qinzhou in the summer of 2004. Anna Liu, who was the administrator of the summer camp in Qinzhou and later came as a visiting scholar to Morehead State University, is the independent administrator of this tuition program.
One hundred and eighty students were served in the 2006/2007 school year. Anna consults with the Education Department of Qinzhou, but her money is separate from their accounts. She is known as a leader in education in the area, having received prizes and awards over the years for her work at No. 1 Middle School, where she is the leader over the teachers. Her outstanding reputation enabled her to gain the trust of the rural teachers and principals.
Each rural school sends their students and a teacher to our tuition gatherings twice a year during school vacations. Since the Qinzhou area is so vast, it is best to let the students come to Qinzhou with their schools’ teacher representative to receive their tuition envelopes. At these gatherings, clothes, shoes and school supplies are dispensed. These meetings are during National Day in October and the February Chinese New Year break. Betty Cutts and Nina Ottinger attended the February 2007 gatherings.
Pen Pal and Sister Schools programs
Blessing Hands is seeking to open up opportunities for our students to communicate internationally through e-pal and pen pal exchanges. We are encouraging pen pal matches between elementary children in Yangshuo and American classrooms through our sister schools program which facilitates exchanges of letters, drawings, and photographs. The American schools are planning book drives to send primary English books to Chinese schools. High school students write e-mail to their foreign friends. We hope to have exchanges of teachers and high school students in the future.
Future Plans
New proposals are planned for the future. We plan to expand to the nation of Honduras next with a tuition program in Yoro, Honduras. All of these activities are designed to help poor children reach their full potential. The Chinese word for fortune is also translated as blessings. All people want to be fortunate or blessed. We want to make it more than luck but sure blessings that they receive and pass on to others. We are seeking to help students reach their full potential. They first help themselves and then are expected to turn and bless others in the same way.