Giving migrants a foundation for life By PATRICK CREWDSON - The Dominion Post LITTLE LEARNERS: Pupils at a You Dao Foundation kindergarten. The foundation also runs schools, a hostel and has plans for a community centre. HAVING A BALL: Children from one of the You Dao Foundation's schools enjoying cricket coaching at the Shanghai Sixes tournament last October. A cricket-loving Kiwi is helping to bring sport, education and social welfare to disadvantaged migrant families in China's biggest city. From beer baron to charity worker - a Kiwi businessman is making a difference to the lives of some of China's most underprivileged children. David Boyle went to China in 1997 as an executive for Lion Nathan, which had a joint venture with a local outfit in Wuxi, and was building its own $230 million brewery in Suzhou, near Shanghai. The 48-year-old former first class cricketer - who played 69 matches for Canterbury in the 1980s and 1990s - left Lion Nathan before the company's losses led it to quit China, but returned to the country in 2002 with his Chinese wife and son. After various consultancy and management jobs, including running a factory in Shanghai's Fengxian district, he became one of the founders of the You Dao Foundation - a charity dedicated to helping the children of migrant workers. The mass migration of workers from poor inland provinces to the industrial powerhouses of the coastal east is one of China's major demographic trends. They go to cities such as Shanghai for jobs in the construction, manufacturing or service sectors and live in humble accommodation on the city fringes. China is due for an official census this year, but Mr Boyle said 2008 estimates that put Shanghai's population at 17.2 million people did not include 5.8 million migrant workers. "It's right in your face every day. The lady who cleans my house is a migrant. The guy who built my apartment is a migrant. This city was built by migrants." China's "hukou" system for household registration means that when rural workers migrate to the big cities they are often deprived of access to public services such as education or healthcare and have to pay for private options. Mr Boyle recalled visiting a school for the children of migrant factory workers shortly after the foundation - formed with Warren Kinne, a professor of philosophy at Fudan University, and Hong Kong lawyer Audrey Leung - launched in 2005. "It was like a concrete bunker from World War II," he said. "It was in the middle of winter and there wasn't a window in the place so the kids were sitting there in their jackets, freezing. They had 40 or 50 kids in this little room doing their school lessons, and we went, 'Bloody hell - this is tough'." Their initial intervention - supplying textbooks - grew till eventually You Dao converted that classroom of 50 pupils into a school for 650 in a new building with a library. They encouraged factory workers to bring their spouse and child to the city with them, finding that the level of social discord dropped if men weren't left alone in the evenings to drink or gamble away their monthly wage. The increased stability in the workforce meant the foundation could pressure factory owners into paying for children's school fees. Once some agreed, "with the other factory owners around the community we just embarrassed them into it". The foundation's projects now include schools, kindergartens, and a women's hostel, with plans on the drawing board to construct a community centre in a poor Shanghai district. It has social workers on the staff who visit migrant families. The foundation also offers educational scholarships and has funded some operations, including a life- saving liver transplant. Last October it ran an event at the Shanghai Sixes cricket tournament, bringing 85 children out for bowling, batting and wicketkeeping clinics with English coaches. "They just loved it. We gave them each an icecream and a can of Coke and fed them up with all kinds of sticky, horrible Western foods." Mr Boyle is a practising Catholic but said the foundation was secular. We're fundamentally here to do good things in the community. The nice thing here is you can do a huge amount with not a lot of money." For a donation of about NZ$60, the foundation can put a child through school for half a year. "And yet for that family it makes a massive difference." Mr Boyle tries to visit one of the schools at least once a week. "It keeps you humble, keeps you on the ground." Patrick Crewdson's travel to China was supported by the Asia New Zealand Foundation. Bottom of Form GIFT-GIVING: David Boyle hands out You Dao Foundation t-shirts to migrant children at one of the charity's project sites in Shanghai's Fengxian district.