Volunteering with Coffee, Marathon Running and Capstone Project: Helping the Visually Challenged in Beijing, China

• In Event: Crafting Help and Hope in East Asia

Abstract

This paper examines the construction of urban identities and urban culture in the practice of volunteering in China. In recent years volunteering has become a popular form of civic engagements in urban China. Volunteering at NGO which involves helping the socially marginalized is seen as particularly meaningful. This paper focuses on volunteering initiatives at one NGO in Beijing, China, which provides services to the visually challenged. This NGO is representative as it is actively participated by the city government, companies, higher education and young people, all of which make volunteering part of their governance, branding, learning programs and personal developments. My presentation focuses on three ethnographic anecdotes of volunteering at this NGO: 1) staffs of transnational coffee chain volunteered to provide audio narrative for movie viewing among the visually impaired; 2) staffs of transnational computer hardware company volunteered to accompany the visually impaired to train marathon running; 3) graduates of NLP schools volunteered to take the visually challenged people to museum touring as part of their course requirement. There is a lot to say in terms of how these volunteering reinforce social hierarchies. But perhaps more interesting would be to examine the construction of urban cultures, urban identities, tastes and habits in the volunteering process.

Author

• Ka-ming Wu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong