How many volunteers do you have now? And who are they?

By the end of the year we had enrolled hundreds of volunteers, organized 12 salons and bonded with near a dozen villages. Our volunteers included professors, civil servants, university students and designers alike. We estimate that by the end of 2015, the number of our volunteers will reach a few thousand and we will be able to reach all different provinces of China through solid work.

China has millions of villages. How do you choose which village to offer help, and how does it work?

Villages seeking volunteer work need to first share their requirements with us and apply for service through social media, and after we confirm their needs, we will help to find their nearest volunteer teams to form a taskforce. The volunteers then could follow four stages: field study and systematic research, cultural record and creative communication, on-spot meeting and training, social networking, local service and seed project incubation.

In view of the fact that in China different government departments normally oversee only one piece of the rural jigsaw such as farming, trade, environment or housing, whereas on the grassroots level people are often unable to bring those pieces together in a creative and synergic whole, we have developed a pool of multi-disciplinary rural experts who can help design "solution kits" for the villagers to choose, the volunteers therefore could serve as a bridge between those villagers and those otherwise inaccessible talents and experts.