Just how hard is it, doing good as a nonprofit in China? Harder than doing business, says Erika Helms, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute in China, which runs Roots & Shoots, an environmental education program for young people. Helms shared her experience in a podcast last week for Am-Cham China‘s first Young Professionals Brown Bag Lunch Series, “NGOs in China: Fact and Fiction”:
“The biggest problem I think NGOs face here is registration. There’s nothing in writing. So everybody sort of finds their own way, and interprets it in different ways. And you find that different ministries interpret it in different ways.
I think other companies face this, but if you’re coming here to make money, the door’s wide open; if you’re here to make money, that’s totally understood. But when you say, well, I’m not making money, I’m a nonprofit – nobody cares, if you’re knocking on government doors.”
In the last year, China has urged local NGOs to “strengthen their capacity,” expressing concern that many of the 354,000 officially registered organizations have closed their doors. Meanwhile, starting January 1, all local nonprofits were hit with a 25 percent tax on their operating income, raising concerns from the other side. JGI China operates as a Chinese company, according to Helms:
“One of the reasons we registered as a Chinese company is that we really want to represent ourselves as Chinese. We don’t want to be seen as international – as the foreigners coming in and telling Chinese how to run their schools, or how to do environmental education. We want to be seen as Chinese who have taken something from abroad but adapted it to China.”
For further reading, Richard Brubaker at Crossroads: A Review of Corporate Social Responsibility in China offers extensive comments on Helms’ talk, then on the future of China’s Government Organized Non-Government Organizations, or GONGOs.
I see these organizations really as the future umbrellas of China’s grassroots organizations. They are the United Way for China, and will continue to play the single largest role in managing China’s philanthropic activities going forward.
