During our start-up year the main focus of Heart to Heart Shanghai was to equip the children's ward playroom at the Shanghai Thoracic (Chest) Hospital. Funds for this were raised amongst Heart to Heart Shanghai Volunteers by way of a small coin donation jar, which incidentally still remains!
We have always been mindful that such donations were purely voluntary as we valued the time our Heart to Heart Shanghai Volunteers donated and did not wish to place additional financial demands on them.
As our group grew in size and purpose, our Volunteers became increasingly aware that we could assist the children who were admitted to the Shanghai Thoracic (Chest) Hospital and their families by providing other necessary items such as clothing, personal grooming products and high nutrician food.
Our Volunteers also became aware that young candidates were readily available for heart surgery sponsorship and that if we could raise a larger sum of money than our internal donation jar could provide we could sponsor children's heart operations through the Gift of Life scheme.
Some of our Heart to Heart Shanghai Volunteers and their spouses individually undertook to sponsor a child and they were then able to visit and play with their sponsored child when he or she was admitted to hospital.
Other Heart to Heart Shanghai Volunteers chose to donate sums of money which were then combined with other donations from social groups in Shanghai to enable us to sponsor our first child, Guo Xi Ping, in March of 2005 and later Zhang Chun Yan in June 2005.
Raising money in this way was a slow process and the consensus of our Volunteers was that we should develop a more effective means of fund-raising. From this came our Heart Bears fund-raising project which was launched in October 2005. This was an immediate success and within two months it had raised sufficient funds to fully pay for ten life-saving heart operations.
The first children to benefit from our Heart Bears project were Sun Yi Han and Feng Xin Yuan. Both children were admitted to hospital in December 2005 and were successfully operated on and returned to their homes in early January 2006.
More sponsorships have taken place since then and our photo albums of the many Heart to Heart Shanghai sponsored children can be viewed by clicking this link.