From a single room in the offices of the Nanjing Theological Seminary, the Amity Foundation - - probably China's only officially registered but genuinely non governmental social development organisation -- has in eleven years grown into a team of 26 staff supporting projects throughout China on a budget, last year, of more than US$ 2 million.

Amity has a bible printing subsidiary and a distinctively Christian identity and funding base, but it is essentially a non-proselytising organisation which designs and implements secular projects in health, education, social welfare and rural development.

Its main strengths, in the view of Overseas Coordinator, Philip Wickeri, are the local knowledge and insight of the wholly Chinese operational staff -- who Wickeri describes as having "more savvy" than foreign development workers -- enriched with the broader development experience of partner organisations in international church networks. These elements enable Amity to channel funds, which are sought on a project basis, from overseas church organisations into locally initiated community based work.

The organisation's evolution has been rapid. "When Amity first came into being neither Board nor staff knew much about development" confesses Associate General Secretary Ting Yenren, who, like Wickeri, has been with the organisation since the start.

Early grants were made to "upgrade facilities in orphanages and big hospitals," in the latter case typically buying equipment such as X ray or ECG machines. It was soon felt, however, that greater need lay in the countryside and that limited resources should be devoted to improving services from which more people could benefit.

Meanwhile, Amity's first year, 1985, also saw the start of a language teaching program, placing volunteer teachers from overseas in teacher training colleges. This program has continued, valued by the organisation not just for its educational contribution but as a 'channel for people-to-people contact.' In the current academic year 82 teachers (three teaching German; three Japanese; the rest English) are working in 33 colleges at prefectural level, mainly in eastern provinces.

In 1986 Amity entered an enduring partnership with Christoffel Blindenmission (Christian Blind Mission International, CBM) which has channelled its support to China through the Foundation ever since. CBM funded programs include training of opthamologists in low cost surgical techniques for, eg, removing cataracts, and introducing health workers, special and integrated education teachers to community based rehabilitation methods. Particular support has been given to the Qinghai Opthalmic Training Centre, serving Qignhai, Tibet, Gansu and Ningxia. Amity has also collaborated with the Golden Key Project to supply tape recorders to rural blind children.

In 1988 the Amity Centre for Hearing Impaired Children was established at the Nanjing School for the Deaf to prepare young children with severely reduced hearing abilities for integration into mainstream schools.

The following year saw the opening, also in Nanjing, of a rehabilitation centre for mentally handicapped children, which provided a base for training parents and teachers and for outreach work in rural communities where a high incidence of mental handicap is correlated to prevalent iodine deficiency disorders.

A close relationship with Hong Kong's Yang Memorial Methodist Social Service led to joint training and rehabilitation work in Nanjing's orphanage, where Amity was already running a "grandmother's program" which sponsored retired people to help orphanage staff and break the institutionþs isolation from the community.

Work has also been undertaken in medical rehabilitation. A 1991 project to pay for surgery for child victims of polio led to a later and more comprehensive program, including post-operative rehabilitation, starting from northern Jiangsu's Pi county, which suffered a polio epidemic in 1989.

The Foundationþs work with people with disabilities is underpinned by a moral commitment to work for the most disadvantaged; but it is also driven by an awareness that afflictions like polio and high levels of congenital abnormality are very often associated with impoverished, insanitary and harsh living conditions.

From 1990, the Foundation began to sponsor in-service training courses in Nanjing for doctors from Qinghai. Village doctor training programs have since been undertaken in south west China and, in Sichuan, a videotape distance learning program for township doctors was carried out in partnership with the local health ministry.

Amity has also translated into Chinese, published and distributed some 90,000 copies of David Werner's classic primary health care manual Where There Is No Doctor.

As the health, education and social welfare programmes grew and consolidated, the Foundation's rural development division began to explore ways of working to address poverty in the most needy, rural areas.

A way was opened up by the disaster relief donations that Amity had, since 1987, made for rebuilding schools and clinics after earthquakes or floods.

In 1991 a total of US$2 million was channelled through Amity for emergency relief in Anhui, Jiangsu and elsewhere, following catastrophic flooding in east China. This was exceptional: most years emergency aid has amounted to only a fraction of that sum (although some of Amityþs overseas donors earmark funds for emergency work.) But the 1991 appeal showed the organisation's capacity for mobilising funds through its now well established network of overseas partners.

Visiting disaster areas to assess needs also helped Amity build relationships with county and provincial level officials and begin to discuss longer term needs with them. Thus the Foundation, in a much shorter timescale, made the same journey from þcharityþ to rural development work that leading international development ngos had taken in the 1970s and 80s.

An early, small scale hydroelectric project in southern Jiangsu provided valuable insights, according to Ting Yenren, as did later support for irrigation pumping stations and a program, in the early 1990s, of borehole sinking and shallow well digging.

Ting recounts that the need for community organisation and management was very quickly appreciated. "If we set up a pumping station, the villagers organise a system for who will operate it, how much each family should pay, whose land should be irrigated. All of these things, if they're going to survive at all, must be democratically managed."

But Ting accepts the need to work with government structures. "Our approach is to work with existing organisations rather than setting up competing ones. Sometimes we use the word 'redemocratise:' we would like to have more people's involvement and collective activity."

Philip Wickeri agrees that "You have to start with people who are already leaders; otherwise we couldn't do anything. And sometimes government is genuinely interested in development and really willing to see a different approach. There are some very good county officials."

In 1993 Amityþs Board of Directors recommended a shift in the Foundationþs rural work towards integrated programs, particularly in the poorest areas of the South West, where a high proportion of people belong to ethnic minority communities.

Irrigation and drinking water projects continued in the poorest areas of Jiangsu, Shandong, and Henan; as did an integrated program in Feixian County, Shandong, which included irrigation, drinking water, slope terracing, primary health care, vocational training, animal husbandry and fodder processing components.

But the main focus of the rural development divisionþs work was soon to become an integrated program in eleven upland villages of Houchang and Bulang townships of Puding Country, Guizhou.

The program began modestly, in 1984, with a series of discrete projects, including water and irrigation, tree planting and goat raising, in different villages. At the same time a three year project was started in the province to improve 25,000 domestic stoves with the aim of reducing the very high incidence of fluorosis, associated with continual exposure to smoke from local coal.

By the following year a broad, three year program had been designed, with a total budget of some US$1.3 million. This makes it much the largest program Amity has yet implemented, but the staff team nonetheless tries to bring to it the kind of care, attention to detail and responsiveness to community feedback than can elude larger agencies.

The program aims to encourage and make possible diversification into fruit and medicinal crops; improved animal husbandry; slope terracing, soil conservation and afforestation; farmer and village health worker training, and vocational training for women; assistance with childrenþs schooling; improvements to coal fired stoves and installation of biogas tanks. Finally, unusually for a project of this kind, Amity has also made a commitment "to address the medical needs of the 2,749 polio patients in Puding County in the areas of surgery and rehabilitation, and then to create more opportunities for the disabled in employment, education and social participation."

The comparatively grand scale of the Guizhou program does not mean the Foundation has outgrown smaller projects. On the contrary, Ting Yenren believes the most promising area for future work may be in giving small scale support to the many local church initiatives in social service.

For Amityþs first five years, he explains, the Foundation was careful not to favour Christian communities when selecting projects. But now he believes Amityþs integrity is widely respected, and that it is perceived by the authorities not as a threat but as a useful provider of services.

At the same time there is something of a þflowering at the grass roots.þ Many local churches are starting to run their own clinics, kindergartens and day centres, which could benefit from Amityþs experience and support. With a network of people already rooted in the community and looking for community solutions to social welfare problems þ the kind of optimum conditions international ngo program managers dream of þ it seems only common sense to support these grassroots initiatives. For after all, as Philip Wickeri is fond of pointing out, þthe church itself is the largest ngo in China.