NextMinds (Civic Education) is a catchphrase for the advocacy part of our work. Increasing citizenship awareness, cultivating the spirit of volunteerism and facilitating the exchange between international and Chinese civil societies are all the bases that form one of the two critical pillars of CNF’s agenda.

The Foundation operates a popular Chinese-language online forum (China Charity Online, 公益慈善论坛) dedicated to the spreading of volunteerism and introduction of the best charity practices to China. It is one of the leading and fastest-growing publishing portals in the charitable sector, with a readership topping 152,000 viewers a week along with a social media following in the excess of 50,000.

We also host various offline forums, seminars, and open discussion groups in the UK and China regularly where we invite charity practitioners, civil society leaders, scholars and alike to join hands and discuss the topics of social development. These offline forums also serve as boundary-spanners between civil organizations in China and Europe, whereby the social development in the UK would be introduced to the wider world, and the experiences and lessons learnt in the West could go eastwards.

Since our inception, we have in many aspects pioneered dialogues in this arena in the UK community. We’ll continue to seek all possible arenas with our partners to host or co-host more educational events in this area.

After a successful seminar in the NextForum 2013 series, Cambridge University