Extended Projects
Evergreen Education Foundation initiates multi-year extended projects that involve collaboration between libraries in one region in order to provide services of extended scale and depth.
ICT Training for the Farmers, Tianzhu County, Gansu Province (2009 – 2012)
An Evergreen central library, Tianzhu No. 1 High School Library in Gansu, collaborating with 6 elementary/middle schools in the nearby 5 agricultural areas, provided IT training to the farmers in these areas. The 6 schools in the villages served as local training sites and their teachers served as local organizers to mobilize villagers. The high school project organizer and seed trainers designed the training contents and methods with the local project teams, selected capable villagers and local teachers as local trainers, guided sustainable development of local training sessions, and built an online forum to support learning and exchange of the villagers with the help from university LIS students as Evergreen volunteers.
An independent 3rd party study showed that:
"The program empowers villagers in three ways: first, they become aware of their information and digital literacy needs; second, they have greater autonomy with regard to access to, and usage of, public computing sites and private computers; and third, rural residents are empowered by valueadded information seeking and usage, as their original social capital is increased through online information creation and knowledge sharing...on the whole, the EEF's training programs helped people move up the pyramid of digital inequality."
A full report of this study was published on Library Trends, Volume 62, Number 1, Summer 2013, pp. 234-260 and can be accessed through the link here.
Health Education, Tongwei County, Gansu Province (2009-2012)
To address the lack of health information and literacy found by surveys, the public library system led by Tongwei County Public Library and the school library system led by Tongwei No. 1 High School Library developed a health education network and a resource sharing alliance. They designed paths for different community groups to acquire health care information and improve health literacy.
The high school developed school-based health education curriculum to improve students’ knowledge and literacy, implemented health checkup for the students. The teacher/ psychological counselor of the school also experimented psychological health education with both teacher-facilitated book and movie discussion for prevention, and onsite psychological counseling for triage and treatment. The county public library provided health seminars, trained the township residents to search online health information, printed a bimonthly digest featured with rotating topics for various demographic groups (e.g. an issue devoted to occupational disease of migrant workers at Chinese New Year, when most of them return home). Both of them then fanned out their service to their satellites, visiting villages and schools to enhance people’s awareness and knowledge, and promote much needed health practices, e.g. oral hygiene.
An assessment survey over 300 rural residents showed that the residents’ awareness of oral disease and prevention had increased from 32.1 percent to 72.3 percent. The migrant workers' awareness of occupational diseases and prevention increased from 21.3 percent to 62.1 percent. The satisfaction rate for all the health education programs reached 81 percent.
A paper presenting this case study was published on Library Trends, Volume 62, Number 1, Summer 2013, pp. 205-233, and can be accessed through the link here.
To help collaborative extended projects, make your donation to the Evergreen Education library program fund.
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Evergreen Education Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit charity registered in California, United States. Registration number 68-0474814.