In order to promote the standardized management of social work and its sustainable development, the Social Work School of the Open University of China and the Philanthropy Times organized a contest to nominate the “Top 100 Chinese Social Work Organizations of 2015”. Nearly 200 organizations from 22 provinces ran as candidates. Some interesting data about the winners is presented below.
1. Geographic Distribution: 44 out of the 100 top social work organizations come from Guangdong. The difference with other regions is thus very striking. Beijing comes second with 11 organizations and Shanghai comes third with 9. In total, 75 out of the 100 top social work organizations are located in eastern China.
2. Income distribution: The data regarding these organizations’ income distribution shows a significant stratification and the sources of their income are relatively few. Since their establishment, the total income of most of these organizations has remained under 20,000,000 RMB. The highest total income out of all of the 100 organizations nominated is 317,850,000 RMB, and the lowest one is 154,900 RMB. Seven social work organizations have been able to gather over 100,000,000 RMB.
3. Social Workers: there is a total of 11207 social workers registered in the 100 social work organizations. The regional differences are still significant. Social work organizations in Shanghai have an average of 251.89 registered social workers while for those in Jiangsu it’s only 7.5 social workers.
There are four interesting points about the social workers in the top 100 organizations: first of all, they are usually young and those who hold key positions in their organizations are aged from 30 to 40. Secondly, the founders and managers of their organizations have a higher educational background and they are able to make strategic decisions for the organization’s development. Thirdly, most of the social workers receive professional training from social work. Fourthly, 38% of the social workers have received social work certificates.
4. Participation in policy advocacy: 36 out of the 44 social work organizations from Guangdong participate in policy advocacy, 7 out of 11 do in Beijing and 5 out of 9 in Shanghai. Advocacy work concerns the treatment of social workers, the development of social work organizations, public interest and more.
