WaveLib 微澜图书馆

微澜图书馆是主要开设在民办打工子女学校或城乡结合部社区中的公益小型图书馆。通过广泛地动员和组织志愿者参与，微澜图书馆能够实现持续稳定的开放，是流动儿童身边真正的“活”的图书馆。请访问同名微信公众号阅读详细中文介绍。

What’s the background?

There are an estimated 292.51 million rural migrant workers¹ in China’s cities as delivery motorbike-riders, labourers, doorkeepers and other jobs that urbanites avoid.
The children of this floating population are called floating children or migrant children.
The families, holding a rural Hukou² and on a tight budget, could only afford low-cost private schools which barely have good education resources, even books.
The organisation is aimed at helping these children.

Though some of these schools do receive donations, the lack of teachers and librarians hinders the daily operation of the school library.
Here, volunteers from WaveLib (Wei Lan Library, Weilan Library) take the responsibility by spending one or two days a week, sorting books, helping kids find good ones and maintaining a rather safe environment to study.
They step even further: conduct both quantitative and qualitative research, reach out to publishing houses and enterprises about possibilities to donate, work with press and media, speak out at forums and conferences and so forth.

Yes! If you are based in China, you are very welcome to be a volunteer on-site to help with the daily operation - this is the key and the heart of the project.
If you’d like to support public communication, promotion, information disclosure, or anything you can think of and are willing to do, you can always find a place here.
You can make a one-time donation, join our monthly donation programme (馆东计划), purchase charity goods, or donate books and equipment.
- If you are familiar with WeChat, follow our WeChat and click 支持微澜 → 捐赠 to make a donation directly.
- If you are working for a press or have some second-hand books to donate, shoot me email to discuss details!
Read more about the project on our official WeChat account and official website (Simplified Chinese). Drop me a message if you don’t speak Chinese, and I’m more than happy to help you learn more about Wei Lan and also the recruitment process.

Source: National Bureau of Statistics, 2021 ↩︎
Hukou, China’s household registration system, which divides the population into two different statuses: agricultural and non-agricultural residency statuses. Yet China provides a wide range of public education, resources in cities, which means only city hukou holders could benefit from, are exceedingly more than schools in rural. ↩︎