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His newly-awarded doctorate was not yet twelve hours old when Wenyuan Shi embarked on a project which has since changed the lives of hundreds of children in rural China.

The idea, Shi said, was simple. With a doctorate in genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in hand, he was young, he felt lucky for the education he had just completed, and he wanted to help children struggling in China, where he had been born and raised.

That desire took the form of the Overseas China Education Foundation, a non-profit organization Shi founded in 1992 before becoming a professor of dentistry and oral biology at UCLA.

Since its inception, the foundation has exploded into an organization with 1,500 members from Los Angeles to Europe, all dedicated to helping children in China’s poorest rural areas attain a basic education by sponsoring their schooling expenses. In 2004, the foundation was sponsoring over 1,200 children.

A branch of the foundation was recently started by a group of UCLA graduate students, who plan to display paintings, calligraphy, and other artwork by OCEF children in the Kerckhoff art gallery Thursday and Friday.

The education foundation has allowed students to give back to their home communities, said Weizhi Rong, a graduate student studying chemical and biomolecular engineering.

“Especially after coming to the U.S., we feel more and more responsible to contribute something back to our hometown,” Rong said, noting that many communities in rural China have schools without buildings, with children writing in the dirt with sticks from a nearby tree.

Instead of waiting until he acquired wealth to start fulfilling that responsibility, Rong decided to join OCEF, where he says his donation of fifty dollars a year allows a child who cannot otherwise afford to pay the tuition and buy books to have the opportunity to attend school.

“In rural China, if you have an education that’s the only way you can get out of that poor area and find some better jobs. Otherwise you will end up at home working as a poor laborer,” Rong said.

Knowing that they have helped allow students to achieve their potential by going to school is what appeals to other members.

“I guess the Chinese culture kind of made me feel that if there are underprivileged children in China who cannot go to school, I kind of have a responsibility to give some money to them,” said Mei Yang, a graduate student in psychology.

Holding up a stack of letters from children who have learned to write in part due to the efforts of OCEF, Yang remarked on the beauty of one child’s handwriting.

“If she didn’t go to school, she wouldn’t even know that she could write this beautifully,” Yang said. “They never know what they missed.”

Children granted scholarships by OCEF are subject to a rigorous verification process to make sure that they are honestly in need of the funding, said Lin He, an OCEF member and mathematics graduate student.

He’s mother, Mao Xiang Dai, is a retired elementary school teacher and OCEF coordinator in her rural hometown of Chen Jia Fang. Money from OCEF is sent to trusted coordinators such as Dai, who can personally verify the need of students requesting funds, He said.

Inspectors are routinely sent to isolated villages in order to ensure that the coordinators are correctly doing their jobs and not favoring relatives, He said.

“We didn’t really have much confidence in (the government’s) system,” Shi said of the original decision to give the money directly to the schools through coordinators.

Those involved say the OCEF policies of using none of the donation money for operational expenses and directly disbursing funds to the particular school of the student in need are the factors which set it apart from other aid organizations.

“We know how important every penny is, how it is difficult to get for them, and we want to put it to the right use,” Shi said.

While Shi was the first president of the foundation, his involvement has dropped off in recent years as his professional career has taken off. So he was pleasantly surprised when a group of graduate students at UCLA approached him last year with the desire to re-implement OCEF in Los Angeles, Shi said.

“To see them going through the same passage, it’s a very rewarding experience,” Shi said.