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Joint efforts help arouse charity awareness
By Xiao Yang (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-01-25 05:58

More than 2,000 calls were recorded in the first two months since then. Although the project was targeted at generous artists, ordinary residents also responded.

"One day a man called in, saying: 'I'm not an artist, but I want to donate some artworks from my collections,'" said Wang Haiping, art director of the Beijing Yanbodu Gallery, who was hired to oversee the collection of donations.

"That was really touching." Despite the tough heat in the summer, there were so many people visiting the office every day - many of them elder artists and some in families, and some artists even donated twice, said Wang.

By the end of last November, the BCA had received more than 500 artworks, including calligraphy, paintings, seal cuttings, sculptures and chinaware. The donors are mainly big-name artists in the capital, including Han Meilin, designer of the mascot of 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The donations were exhibited in Beijing last December and moved to Tianjin, Hangzhou and some cities in Guangdong and Shandong provinces. The BCA plans to auction a first batch before the Spring Festival, according to Cheng Liyan, the BCA's deputy secretary-general.

Cheng declined to predict the gains from the auction but was optimistic about the outcome.

"Owing to the works of these leading artists, the value of the donations is obvious," she said. "Considering the charity theme of the auction, the outcome will be more than a normal auction can yield."

The BCA planned to use 30 per cent of the auctioned money to cover the project's operational costs and the rest for its charity schemes, according to Cheng.

She attributed the imminent success to the partnership with the Beijing Evening News.

"The media can reach many more people than we do," she said. "They let more people know who are in need of help, what we are doing, and how we are going to use their money."

BCA has not finished its financial report of 2005 yet, but Cheng was confident the revenue will be higher than the 2004 level.

Despite the exciting performance in the media-backed charity experiment, the BCA remains cool-minded about the tough journey ahead.

Challenges in the growth of the BCA and the charity industry as a whole include inadequate public awareness, a general mistrust of charitable organizations and restrictive government regulations in some ways, said Zhang, BCA president.
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