Clover Youth was initiated by the high school graduates, who are dedicated to create learning opportunities via practice and social environment led by youth peers, cultivating youth with love, ideas and action. It is located in Guangzhou city.

"What do you think life is like as a chef?" A question posted to ChunHua school students by the host at the very beginning of the lecture. 

Following last week's Chef class sponsored by Green Grass Weekend Camp, a subsequent class on Chef’s Expertise started in the afternoon of the 25th  at ChunHua school. Comparing to the first class which focused on hands-on in cake baking, this second class focused on the expertise, knowledge relevant to a professional chef.   The goal is to increase students' interest and understanding of the profession of chef through these lessons and activities

"The chef is a cook!", said one of the girls telling us what is her idea of a chef like.  Most students consider chef is a hard working profession.  After introduction by high school teacher on chef’s basic situation, such as grade levels of chef, compensations, working condition and required quality, ethics, etc., students began to understand more about the profession of chef. The guest speaker presented a thought-provoking question to students : "Do you know why some chefs can command a higher salary such as eight or nine thousand Yuan per month, and some chefs can get only three or four thousand ?"

Clover Youth was initiated by the high school graduates, who are dedicated to creating a more loving community through youth leadership. It is located in Guangzhou city.


On a sunny afternoon in May, students from Qincao Youth Service Center visited Sun Yat-sen University. For some students, it is their first time visiting a university. They were amazed by the environment of the campus and asked a ton of questions to the university students leading the tour. 

Our tour guides then led us in an activity they called, "Market Survey". We talked about their entrepreneurial inspirations and discussed some of our innovations. MinXian our facilitator for the activity, asked us a few questions: how would your products be accepted by the market? The maximum profit must be based on understanding the market and customers, so how does one understand the market and customers? During their thinking and discussion, Ming Xian raised the theme of the activity—market survey. With an easy but vivid way, he explained why and how we have to do market survey.  Each group launched debates and came up with outlines.

With the outlines, the next step was field survey. Within 50 minutes, each group tried their best to collect as much samples for the date as possible in the campus. At first, the junior students hesitated to speak to the strangers though they had rehearsed their parts. The staff and senior students tried hard to help them to stop the passers and interview them. They hope each child could participate in the survey, experience and grow in the process.

Qingcao Youth Service Center was initiated by the high school graduates, who are dedicated to create learning opportunities via practice and social environment led by youth peers, cultivating youth with love, ideas and action. It is located in Guangzhou city. 

Service learning has been developing for over 40 years in America, but it’s a new world for most Chinese educators. When I first heard about it, I thought it was definitely time to put social service into the framework of Chinese curriculum. Later, during a conference I attended in America in 2012, I realized that service learning covers many more things than I had previously thought. This 3-day workshop made me understand key factors such as youth voice, introspection, assessment, etc. I hope we could hold similar meeting in the future and create an opportunity for our partners to learn. 

In a forum in Qinhuangdao, I got to know Ma Xuejia, a PhD of Hong Kong Lingnan University. I learned from him that an Asia-Pacific conference on service learning will be held by Lingnan University and Sun Yat-Sen University in June in Hongkong. Considering the expensive cost of travel, I applied to attend the conference with support from our NGO partners in Guangzhou.    

After a discussion, they agreed to admit 10 persons from 10 NGOs to attend the conference without paying service fees, which encouraged us a lot.

This year, East Villagers gained a very unique partnership with the Clover Project. Together, they initiated an “art collaboration,” in which both the East Villagers US interns and the Chinese summer camp students explored a common theme through the medium of art. 

For our project, each of the EV interns created posters and pictures, representing our understanding of Christmas and how it is celebrated in America. We broke down the most important themes and traditions into four categories: Christmas decorations, folklore and myths, the Christmas Spirit, and the Nativity Story. Each piece included a visual, along with a brief background of the tradition: its history, importance, and relevance to how Americans celebrate Christmas. Made to be interactive, each one included suggestions for the students at the summer camp to create something tangible of their own in hopes of learning a little more about Christmas in the Western Culture.  

As we hoped, the students were interested in our project and were very responsive with their own creations. In response to our “decorations” activity, the students went above and beyond what we asked of them, creating not a shopping list, but the actual decorations! They first compared Christmas decorations with those of the Spring Festival (i.e. Chinese New Year) and later made their own Spring Festival decorations, such as Chinese couplets and paper cuts shaped as swans and lanterns. For our “folklore and myths” section, the students also made a visual, representing the background and history of Spring Festival. Lastly, the students depicted the Spring Festival Spirit by creating a shadow paper cut drawing to show how the Spring Festival originated and its developments since.

We would like to thank the Clover Project for such a successful collaboration, especially with it being our first of the sort! We are ecstatic that the students enjoyed this project and hope they learned more about Christmas and how it is celebrated in America as much as we have about the Spring Festival and its celebration in China.