Evergreen International is a small organisation that arranges volunteer teaching placements for British Citizens at 'British Cultural Exchange' summer camps in China. We are based in Canterbury, Kent, in the South East of England.

Evergreen International was formed as a consequence of a series of mutual negative experiences encountered by some of our team on volunteer projects with bigger, well known organisations. The issues ranged from a lack of support given to the teachers in China to unfulfilled promises about accommodation. The most critical issue was the revelation that as well as charging each volunteer up to £1300 plus flights, many companies charge the Chinese schools a fee of up to £800 per volunteer to cover recruitment and training. It also became apparent that at times there was NO training! We believed that taking these amounts of money from British volunteers was unnecessary and taking them from China, which is still remarkably poor compared to the West, was simply unethical.

Having been volunteers that had intended to make a difference without being motivated by financial profit, the vision or mission of Evergreen International is to deliver high quality cultural exchange experiences for both British volunteers and Chinese students and teachers at the MINIMUM COST

 

We have been arranging our hugely successful summer camp programmes throughout cities in Guangdong Province since 2004, including Chaozhou, Guangzhou, Huizhou, Jiangmen, Maoming, He Yuan, Shaoguan, Ru Yuan, Qing Yuan, Zhaoqing, Zhuhai, Zhanjiang and Zhongshan. Evergreen International also has a growing number of important Chinese contacts in businesses, Universities and local government throughout the southern Province of Guangdong which enables us to increase the number of teaching placements available year upon year.

A combination of previous success and valuable contacts has ensured that since the summer of 2006, in addition to our summer camp programme for children, Evergreen International also holds summer camps for Chinese Teachers of English. This is designed to develop a very different method of teaching to which Chinese children are accustomed and is effective at increasing confidence and participation. This programme is a critical part of our ongoing project for developing oral English ability in China and is rapidly becoming the largest part of our organizational focus.

Another notable success was the summer camp held in Chaozhou, which is one of the poorer cities in Guangdong Province, in 2005. We are told that the summer camp was the first of its type to be held in the city, this belief was reinforced by the huge amount of attention we received and the fact that we even made the local news on TV. The summer camp in Chaozhou was also lucky enough to be sponsored by '7 Up', who provided a wonderful stage and sound system in order that the children could deliver a memorable closing performance.

For further info about this exciting opportunity, please email:

INFO@EVERGREENINTERNATIONAL.CO.UK