Our Approach

One of our first workshop participants, Zhong Na, has become a workshop leader on our children’s education projects.  As a young migrant woman, she experienced huge pressure from her parents to return to her home village in Shandong province, and fulfill traditional expectations of a woman’s role by marrying and producing a son.  However, Zhong Na wished to pursue a career as a teacher, something which her lack of education would have prevented.  Through her involvement with Hua Dan, we worked on a way in which she could pioneer our children’s education project as chief facilitator, employing her and training her in skills that support both her personal and professional development.  Her confidence has been transformed, along with her expectations of what she can achieve in life and her family now fully supports her decisions.  Additionally, she has become a future leader at Hua Dan in pioneering our innovative work in applying arts-based approaches to the school curriculum for migrant children.

Hua Dan has inspired an exceptional group of young people to lead and facilitate our work and has a strong company culture that has developed an outstanding reputation in China. We have developed a strong set of values that inspire our work and are creating leadership at all levels of the organization that engenders respect amongst partners and co-collaborators. When Birmingham Royal Ballet, for example, came to China to identify appropriate organisations in the community with which to work, Hua Dan was recommended to them by the British Council as the first choice for collaboration.

Scheherazade spends the initial period of time of its engagement with the community in running workshops that help to identify key needs and issues of relevance to support strong programme design. We believe in programmes that link together key stakeholders from the corporate, government and civil society. In Sichuan, with Hua Dan, for example, our initial phase of workshops were run in collaboration with schools in the affected area, and also through a collaboration with World Vision. We were able to use the initial period to do a needs assessment in the earthquake area that has informed programme design that has a multiple-stakeholder approach. Furthermore, through identifying and working with our first Sichuan Project Manager, Gao Yan, her direct experience of being an earthquake victim has further enriched the way we deliver programmes in the community. The innovative nature of our work has attracted the attention of local schools and funding bodies with whom we are now partnering to develop a model for psycho-social rehabilitation that can be scaled-up in the coming years.

Dong Fen, one of our first participants, is a migrant woman from Yunnan province. She has been attending our workshops since our inception in 2004 and became a facilitator in 2007. At Hua Dan, she has been trained in all aspects of workshop facilitation, theatre skills, project management, English and business skills and is now the in-country General Manager for Hua Dan. Her responsibilities include overseeing our team of facilitators, managing relationships, fundraising, monitoring and evaluation and financial management. She has a salary of 5000RMB per month, equivalent to an educated graduate professional, which has helped her to buy her parents a proper brick structure house, rather than the traditional earth houses typical of impoverished parts of Yunnan, thereby lifting herself and her family out of extreme poverty.

As part of the Founder and CEO’s commitment to genuine empowerment models, a key part of the model is in identifying earned-income opportunities that reduce dependency on grants in the long-term. Sustainable businesses, as she sees it, are engines for economic growth, contributing to the economy and generating income that also enhances self-esteem and confidence in the groups we empower. Our understanding of the market gaps in training of Chinese workers, coupled with market research conducted by INSEAD in partnership with Hua Dan, have identified a need for training of China’s workforce in the soft skills that Hua Dan aims to develop. We have therefore identified the potential to create significant earned-income through developing a corporate training side to our work that serves to reinforce and underline our mission.

Scheherazade is in the process of documenting our work in a manual that contains our vision and philosophy, working processes, systems, methodology and model.  This will enable us to reinforce and underpin the other 5 steps of our working model into a coherent whole to enable ease of replication.

The model is not necessarily chronological but all six components intertwine to form the basis of Scheherazade’s work.