As one of the main projects of the RICI Foundation, the "Ignite Project" program has been recruiting college student volunteers with a strong sense of public service since 2016. Through providing funds, course packages, and training, the program equips volunteers with basic knowledge of child development and psychology, as well as various practical skills for conducting psychological activity classes. It supports volunteers to carry out summer camps on mental literacy themes in rural areas, helping rural children improve their psychological resilience and filling the gap in mental health education in rural areas.
Before the summer camp, the “Ignite Project “ team provided 15 online trainings and 3 offline trainings for the college student team to help them fully understand the curriculum concepts and key and difficult points.During the training, the “Lgnite Project” not only conveyed the relevant concepts of the "Rici’s mental literacy curriculum" to volunteers, but also taught them professional skills such as how to interact with children and manage classroom discipline, helping volunteers grasp the psychological characteristics of children and quickly adjust their coping styles.
Based on the practical experience of the past eight years, the “Ignite Project” will be transformed into a exquisite model, providing in-depth services to children in hard-to-reach villages in the counties where Rici’s cooperates, with the implementation quality and effectiveness as the first consideration, and achieving better allocation of project resources.
In 2023, the Ignite Project” supported 95 university teams (29 themed camp teams and 66 curriculum cooperation teams) and 553 college student volunteers to carry out psychological theme summer camps, bringing summer camp courses to 6,746 rural children, with a service duration of 67,224 hours. During the period, 8 college student trainers were trained.Among them, the theme camp team brought a two-week "Confidently Shine" themed mental literacy curriculum to 2,356 rural children. The course partner team developed a mental literacy themed curriculum for rural children that covered self-awareness, emotional management, and interpersonal relationships.
