Now that Christmas is over and Spring festival is around the corner, it’s time to look back on the year in order to prepare for the future. This year, Shanghai Young Bakers is training its 10th batch of students. The coming year will undoubtedly be meaningful for SYB and its supporters.
Every year Shanghai Young Bakers receives support from many partners, sponsors, volunteers and friends. Without this support, Shanghai Young Bakers would be unable to provide the high quality training it offers to marginalized Chinese youths. Providing a one-year free training entails operational costs, which we often seek to cover thanks to contributions and donations.
Every year we need to provide students with many items they use in their daily lives. Shanghai Young Bakers buys many of these items but our partner, APM, also helps SYB greatly by providing students with arrival kits. All year round, APM also donates many items such as bed cover, clothes, school bags or basket balls. Students have their own SYB uniforms, which they wear in class. This year, Creastyle kindly provided each student with two sets of uniforms.
On the technical side, SYB also benefits from partners donating ingredients, essential for students to bake high quality products. Sinodis generously provides us with ingredients such as cream, butter, chocolate, while Grands Moulins de Paris gives us all the flour used during classes. Our main financial partner, Lesaffre, also provides us with yeast used for baking. These three sponsors also offer our students professional technical trainings.
SYB’s other two financial partners also contribute to the program by offering in-kind donations. SC Johnson provides cleaning products, essential to keeping our facilities clean. Henkel provides with personal cleaning products.
Our Baking Center is functional but we always seek donations or sponsors to acquire new mixers, refrigerators and many other baking and kitchen utensils.
On a more administrative side, we are really grateful to receive support from Mazars who has been providing SYB with pro-bono accounting services for many years. This help is essential for running the program according to regulations and professional accountancy. For communication and marketing matters, we are really fortunate to receive support from Chaos Studio, which prints all our communication material.
Throughout the year, employees from different companies grant some of their spare time to SYB by visiting our Baking Center or the students’ classroom and training our students on a range of topics. These sessions are essential to the students’ training. Hygiene with Silliker, Fire Safety training with Mark Xu from GE corporate or Kay from Dragon Fly on career training , all contribute to the program…
On behalf of SYB, I would like to thank all these in-kind partners who help us day by day by enhancing our program’s quality and making it more efficient. We are always looking for in kind sponsors ! If you, as an individual, or a representative of your company is interested in helping us, do not hesitate to contact us to learn more about how to support our charity program.
Marine
Program Director