About EEF

Evergreen Education Foundation is an NGO founded by oversea Chinese friends in 2001 in the United States. Its mission is to bring educational opportunities to rural China through efforts in the following areas: providing scholarships for the financially disadvantaged, expanding capabilities of schools and libraries to add value to local communities and advancing knowledge and understanding by exchanges through conferences and workshops. China Evergreen Rural Library Service (CERLS) was established in 2002. It is responsible for project execution coordination, and monitoring for Evergreen libraries in China.

Since the first school library - Qinghai DaTong No. 6 High School, Evergreen has helped 40+ libraries in Qinghai, GanSu, ShaanXi, JiangSu, GuiZhou, YunNan, ShanXi. Among them 18 are central libraries. These libraries in turn helped 20+ satellite libraries nearby. Evergreen's model of library development in rural China focusing on capability build has been widely recognized. CERLS was awarded the 2004 Access to Learning Award, shared with the Aarhus library of Demark, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

About ITIE

The annual training and exchange based on workshop or conference is a special service that Evergreen provides for building capacity of the rural libraries. Since 2003, every other year in the odd years Evergreen organizes a workshop on rural library development, while every other year in the even years, Evergreen hosts an international conference on the same topic. Up to now, Evergreen has held 4 successful international conferences:

1. In July 2004, Evergreen co-hosted a conference in Beijing with Beijing No. 80 High School, with the theme "Library's Role in the Cultural Exchange between the East and the West";
2. In June 2006, Evergreen co-hosted a conference in Kunming with YunNan Provincial Library, and Concern for the Next Generation, with the theme "Information Ethics";
3. In May 2008, Evergreen co-hosted a conference in HuZhou, Zhejiang with LingHu High School, HuZhou Educational Information Center, with the theme "Connecting Rural Communities".
4. In June 2010, Evergreen co-hosted a conference in Lanzhou, Gansu with the Gansu Provincial Library and Lanzhou University. The theme was” Inspiration from Best Practices”.
5. In November 2012, EEF co-hosted a conference in Hangzhou, Zhejiang with Hangzhou City Library, with the theme “Libraries as Community Education Centers”. Please refer to http://www.evergreeneducation.org/itie2012/ for details of this conference.

Every international conference witnessed 200-300 delegates. Evergreen sponsors around 100 rural librarians and teachers to participate each time. The conference delegates and the speakers came from areas including US, Europe, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South-east Asia and Mainland China, and consisted mostly of educators, library professionals &researchers, and NGO members.