CRI Voices:"免費的兒童午餐“(2)

Deng Fei admits it is never easy to achieve zero cost operations for a project such as this. "Many tasks have to be completed by the teachers of these schools. It's impossible for them to do a job voluntarily for a lifetime,such a cost should be calculated." According to its 2011 financial statement released through its official microblog, Free Lunch for Children project spent up to 250,000 yuan on the allowance to volunteers and the administrative costs. That constitutes 8 %of total expenses of the charity, below the 10% cap set by government regulations. Whether the cost of operations should be disbursed from the donations or raised in another manner is an issue which still requires further discussion. Besides regulating operating costs, how to go about creating a financial report in a more professional manner, with a clear statement of daily income and expenses, so that the public can adequately supervise institutions like this, is another issue yet to be resolved. "We hope software can be developed to collect data from each school everyday, and bring about real time updates of donations received and the expenses that they go towards." Free Lunch could be an example for other charities based on social networks. Head of the Beijing Normal University One Foundation Philanthropy Research Institute Wang Zhenyao believes it's time to make the developing project more professional. "In the future development, the project must be operated by professionals. As the Free Lunch project is donated by people though microblog on the internet, it should provide much clearer reports to donors." Wang adds there are still many challenges to be solved for the project, such as how to attract professional people to work for it, and how to make the project more transparent. Free Lunch project is seeking a third party to release and audit their financial statements.