Experiential philanthropy in China

ABSTRACT

Experiential philanthropy is a form of service-learning where students are provided with money (generally from a foundation) to distribute to nonprofit organizations. The pedagogy is intended to teach students not only about philanthropy but also about how to evaluate philanthropic responses to social issues. In recent years, scholars have begun to explore how an experiential approach to the philanthropic process could result in a more philanthropically engaged and committed citizenry. This research has provided promising evidence of the efficacy of experiential philanthropy as a pedagogic strategy – particularly within higher education. Despite its effectiveness, research on experiential philanthropy has focused primarily on the US. As such, we have no knowledge of the effectiveness of this pedagogic strategy in other regions of the world – especially in emerging philanthropic regions such as China. Therefore, using three semesters of original pre- and post-course survey data (including quantitative and qualitative responses) obtained from students enrolled in an Introduction to Nonprofit Management course at a university in northeast China, this study addresses the following question: To what extent does experiential philanthropy enhance Chinese students’ understanding of, and commitment to, philanthropy?

KEYWORDS:

• Experiential philanthropy
• service learning
• philanthropic education

Notes

1. The Introduction to Nonprofit Management course that students were enrolled in is a required course for the undergraduate degree in Public and Nonprofit Administration in the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) at Rutgers University-Newark (RUN). In 2015, RUN established a dual degree program with NENU. The program (Rutgers University Newark Institute at Northeast Normal University (RUNIN)) requires students at NENU to take the same courses offered on the RUN campus. As such, all program components are in English.

2. Although not all degree programs at NENU are English-taught, there are a large number of English-taught programs at the university. As such, the students enrolled in this course tend to be similar (in terms of English speaking ability) to a large portion of the NENU student body.

3. All students were Chinese. All students were also aged in the same category (18 to 25). In the post-course survey, 70.45% of the student respondents were female. This percentage is not particularly high given that 72.48% of the student body at Northeast Normal University in 2017 was also female (http://www.sohu.com/a/163894450_500229). Given that this course is a required course in the undergraduate degree program in Public and Nonprofit Administration, all students were enrolled in this major. Although the demographics of the students (including the student body of NENU) is fairly homogenous, this provides us with an opportunity to rule of outside demographic factors that could have influenced our results. Thus, for this reason, we consider the homogeneity of the sample to be a benefit.

4. Word frequencies were analyzed aggregately. Given that the total number of post-course respondents was limited to 62 and that it was rare for a student to use a particular word multiple times in the answer to a specific question, we treated students as a whole to investigate the overall effectiveness of the experiential philanthropy course instead of examining the heterogeneous effect of the course on individual students.

5. We excluded words that appeared less than five times for the learn and plan questions. Additionally, we only included the first five most frequently appearing words for the like and others questions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Huafang Li

Huafang Li is an assistant professor in the School of Public, Nonprofit, & Health Administration at Grand Valley State University. His research interests relate to research methods, nonprofit management, and comparative public administration with a focus on China.

Lindsey M. McDougle

Lindsey M. McDougle is an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University Newark. Her current research focuses on the relationship between pedagogy and philanthropic responses to social issues.

Apoorva Gupta

Apoorva Gupta is a doctoral student in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University Newark.