Since the establishment of the first graduate volunteer teaching group in 1998, RUC has seen a total of 475 volunteers from the Western Program dedicate themselves to volunteer service. The 2024-2025 academic year's Western Program volunteers from the university include 35 undergraduate graduates and graduate students (with 20 students forming the 26th Graduate Volunteer Teaching Group), who have set off to 10 provinces and autonomous regions, including Xinjiang, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou, as well as 14 counties, focusing on local economic development, basic education, and the development of county youth.
The Western Program volunteers service is a significant talent project jointly organized and implemented by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. The Western Program is designed to comprehensively promote rural revitalization, recruit volunteers from universities nationwide to work in the western regions for 1-3 years each year. They serve as pioneers and main forces in fields such as scientific and technological innovation, rural revitalization, green development, and social service, further guiding and encouraging college graduates to actively integrate into the overall development of the country.
In recent years, volunteers have led more than 300 students from the depths of the mountains to university campuses. They have established 10 clubs for teaching middle schools and created more than 120 club courses, encouraging them to take action themselves, so that they can truly feel that their strength is far beyond our imagination.
In Rong County, Sichuan, the classes taught by volunteers swept the top four in single-subject grades; in Jiang'an, Sichuan, a class organized by volunteers in the service area saw many students admitted to RUC; in Tacheng, Xinjiang, the class taught by volunteers achieved great progress in students’ grades within a semester and has continued to be in the forefront...
In February 2024, Ma Yichuan, who was serving in Rong County, Sichuan, with the help of Professor Wu Benli and the Shenzhen Alumni Association of RUC, raised 80,000 yuan in donations for Yuzhang Senior High School in Rong County, installing the first electronic screen and other electronic equipment in the Yongshan Auditorium, benefiting 1,600 high school students in the school.
Since October 2021, volunteers have launched three phases of a project where they select outstanding volunteers to deeply pair up with outstanding students in the service area, match each student in the service area with a "Renmin University Youth Mentor," focus on two themes of academic tutoring and broadening horizons, and carry out one-on-one online tutoring on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.
To date, the activity has provided 1,219 children in the service area with volunteers from RUC, with a total of 8,428 classes and more than 20,000 hours of service. In the activity, volunteers have told the children what real university is like, how to make their own plans, which extracurricular books are worth reading etc to realize their dreams, allowing these children from the depths of the mountains to feel the approachable world, the respectable knowledge, and their promising future.
Volunteers always adhere to the idea of "doing a little more for the children," creating six types of resource-driven activities for basic education in the service area, such as inviting teaching and research group leaders, special-grade teachers, and doctoral students from prestigious domestic and foreign schools to create the brand activity called "Open Class"; cooperating with Tencent Documents and Tencent Public Welfare to carry out three phases of the brand public welfare activity "Wish Document"; and cooperating with the Youth League Committee of the Business School of ruc and student organizations within the school to coordinate resources to carry out more volunteer project and other characteristic activities. They widely link the strength of alumni, universities, and enterprises, gather resources from all walks of life, and make the greatest effort to bring more help to the children in the service area.
In recent years, the university's Western Program volunteers have deeply involved in rural economic development, township basic education, and county youth development based on their professional expertise, and have been awarded honorary titles such as "Honorary Citizen," "Honorary Villager," "Special Contribution Award," and "Outstanding Teaching Volunteer Teacher" by the service area. Their deeds have been widely reported by mainstream media such as People's Daily, People's Daily Online, China Youth Daily, China Youth Network, and China Youth Writer etc.
