“Kids don’t want to go on vacation, anymore; they prefer school!” – how Dolores turned a very difficult situation in a solution with role model character not only for schools for children needing special care.

Dolores van Dongen, Founder & CEO, Sunshine Learning Center, Beijing, P. R. China

When we entered the Sunshine Learning Center in the suburbs of Beijing, it did not feel like visiting a school for children with special needs, but rather like a place where children like to live, play and learn. Colourful walls, cosy rooms, friendly toys, places to relax – that’s how we would have liked school. As Dolores explained, this is the first school of this kind in China; 16 teachers and therapists are responsible for the care of 8 children with severe learning problems, most of them Down Syndrome.
“Everything had to be created from scratch”, Dolores told us; “a completely individual education plan, special tea-ching methods combined with different kinds of therapy was needed.” Now that Dolores has proven that the systems works for eight children, she wants to scale it up and plans to move to a new place soon. Her medium-term goal is to set up a Sunshine Special School for max. 100 children, next to the already existing Sunshine Learning Center, which will only dedicate itself to the training of Chinese local educators in special education, therapies like physical, sensory integration, occupational and speech therapy. It will work close together with two local universities. The School will serve as a training basis for the teachers to practice their new skills on the students in the School.
Dolores used to work for many years in the airline busi-ness, managing KLM’s operations in China. Her business skills help a lot to build a financially sustainable educa-tional facility. This is a task tried and not achieved by many in the world. It was a pleasure to see what fantas-tic results can be achieved with the right mixture of solid business experience, hard work and the passion to create a better world for everybody.

Enjoy reading more about some of the topics we discus-sed with Dolores and her thoughts in the selected quota-tions below. You may be able to read more about her and her growing Sunshine Learning Centre in our book “MyImpact”.

Dolores van Dongen’s selected quotations:
“My daughter Laura was born and diagnosed with Down Syndrome. I took her to the Netherlands for heart surgery as this was not possible at that time in Beijing. Then I thought – what do people do here in China if they don’t have connections abroad?”

“Laura was lucky enough to be accepted at the Montes-sori International School. However after Laura got older, the problems to deal with her in a mainstream environ-ment without proper special education support were get-ting too much. It was time to take a decision to change schools for Laura. I checked many schools here in Beijing but none of the “normal” ones wanted to accept my daughter. The special ones did not look good to me; they weren’t happy places where I would want my daughter to stay. Well, the options were to stay at home and take care of my kids full time – which I am not skilled for - or to set up my own school. So I picked the school.”

“I knew I needed kids with special needs, parents with special needs and specialists (speech, occupational, physical and other therapists). That’s how I started – by distributing flyers and looking for those people.”

“I don’t have the patience to work with my kids all the time. And they, honestly, don’t have it with me, either.”

“I wanted to change things, but not only on an island for foreigners and privileged. Except for the care for the chil-dren – children of different nationalities and financial backgrounds - the school should be a training facility for local educators and therapists.”

“If it weren’t for my kids, I would most probably still be in the commercial business. What I am doing now is comple-tely different. What is great is that I can make a diffe-rence and help out.”

“It is a very satisfactory feeling to know about the load taken away from the parents, to see children getting care at a right place and where you can see the students im-prove step by step. Kids don’t want to go on vacation, anymore; they prefer school! That’s so much worth.”

“Financially it is not an easy task. At this moment I do not derive any income from my endeavours and I had to make initial investments. At some point I will probably need to get a regularly paid job, again. But not before the school is standing on sound foundation and someone else can manage it in the way my vision or dream wanted it to be.”

“My vision for the future in this area is to have a school for 70 Chinese and 30 foreign children. The fee of the Chinese students would be sponsored. The Sunshine Learning Center would increase respect for teachers working in this challenging area and would leverage the skills and know how. Later, we would add a vocational training centre and potentially residential services for youth with special needs. I have a business plan for all this already worked out.”

Some background on Dolores van Dongen:
Dolores is Dutch and she graduated in Sinology in the Ne-therlands. That’s where she met her Chinese husband and later moved to Beijing to join him. In 1996, she started working for KLM, the Dutch national airline, and significantly enlarged their operations in China by setting up the important Shanghai office that she later managed for 4 years. After years in traditional commercial business, Dolores quit her job for several reasons, one of them to be able to travel less and have more time for her three children in Beijing. It was also at that time that her 6-years old daughter was diag-nosed with Down Syndrome and also her youngest son started having behaviour problems. Instead of looking for another commercial job, Dolores established the Sunshine Learning Centre in Beijing in 2004 where her own, other expatriate and Chinese kids with special needs can get the care they need.

Some background on the Sunshine Learning Center:
Sunshine Learning Center (SLC) opened its doors to stu-dents on February 2004 and is the first school for foreign children with special needs in Beijing. At SLC, a multi-disciplinary team provides individualized educational pro-grams. The teacher-student ratio is kept small. The lan-guage of instruction is English. The nine students at Sun-shine are served by a team of two foreign lead teachers and four local teaching assistants on a daily basis. At present, an occupational therapist, a sensory integration/ occupation therapist, a physiotherapist and a dance, mu-sic and art instructor work on a part-time basis with the children.
SLC believes that every child has a right and the potential to learn and to be as independent as s/he could. The ge-neral curriculum content includes the academics, social and vocational skills, physical education, daily living skills and the arts. The educational program is tailored for each individual child with the support of the whole team, the family and the child (where possible).
SLC is registered as a Chinese non-profit organization. It is also working in partnership with the local Shunyi School for Special Education to train their staff as part of Sun-shine’s vision of contributing to the local community in the area of special needs. It is the sincere desire of the foun-der to make Sunshine Learning Center a model-learning centre for both the children with special needs as well as for the community it is now in.

If you would like to engage with the work of Dolores van Dongen or get to know more about the Sunshine Learning Center please visit www.sunshine.org.cn,
or, for more specific opportunities, contact joanna.stefanska@myimpact.ch or wolfgang.hafenmayer@myimpact.ch directly.