Education to nurture kindness in Chinese children

ACTAsia’s Caring for Life Children’s Education Programme 

In classrooms across China in 2025, children were encouraged to ask deeper questions: How do my choices affect animals? Why does kindness matter? What responsibility do I have to the world around me?

ACTAsia believes that real change begins early. When children are given the tools to understand compassion, responsibility and interconnectedness, those values shape not only their own lives, but the future of their communities. What children learn at school does not stay in the classroom — it travels home, influences behaviour, and shapes how families and communities relate to animals, people and the planet.

Through its award-winning Caring for Life (CFL) Children’s Education Programme, ACTAsia continued to embed these principles at the heart of education in 2025. The programme supported schools to prioritise empathy, wellbeing and environmental awareness, using education as a powerful tool to build compassion, resilience and long-term social change.

Over the year, ACTAsia reached 9,399 children and trained 1,516 teachers in humane education. Delivered through a structured six-year curriculum, CFL enables schools to adopt a whole-school approach to mental health and wellbeing, while equipping teachers to foster pro-social behaviours, raise environmental awareness and promote animal protection, empowering children not just to learn, but to actively care about the world around them.

Beyond the classroom, the programme creates a lasting ripple effect. Teachers report a marked increase in positive social behaviours, with lessons influencing families and local communities as children carry their learning into everyday life.

Earth Day 2025: Learning to Care for Our Planet

Earth Day sits at the heart of ACTAsia’s CFL programme, offering teachers and students an opportunity to experience this transformative education before implementing the full six-year curriculum.

In April 2025, ACTAsia celebrated its fifth consecutive Earth Day, focusing on biodiversity as a core pillar of “green education.” The programme highlighted the importance of collective action and global responsibility, helping students understand how protecting nature today safeguards their future.

The response was extraordinary:

• 148 schools and educational institutions took part
• 59,000 teachers participated in training workshops
• 16,591 students received biodiversity-themed lessons

Teachers were provided with engaging educational toolkits that explored the interdependence of species, the realities of global biodiversity loss, and the role young people can play in protecting ecosystems. These lessons inspired curiosity, responsibility, and hope — essential foundations for long-term environmental stewardship.

Growing Empathy: ACTAsia’s Summer Camp in rural China

In August, ACTAsia delivered its much-loved Summer Camp at Haiyuan County No. 2 Primary School in rural western China. Over four immersive days, more than 100 children took part in project-based learning, teamwork challenges, and hands-on activities designed to deepen their connection with nature and strengthen empathy for all living beings.

Haiyuan County faces extreme environmental and economic hardship, and research shows children in such regions are at greater risk of depression and academic difficulties. The Summer Camp was designed to counter this by offering joyful, confidence-building experiences that promote social responsibility, emotional well-being, and positive self-belief.

ACTAsia believes that when children begin making small, compassionate choices, those values spread, influencing peers, families, and communities, and contributing to healthier, more resilient societies over time.

The Power of Prevention

As the pressures facing our planet, animals and communities continue to grow, ACTAsia’s work has never been more urgent. Education remains one of the most powerful tools we have to prevent cruelty before it happens, by shaping values, building empathy and helping children understand their responsibility to one another and to the world they share.

By investing in children, we are helping to nurture kinder, more thoughtful human beings, whose choices will influence the health of our planet, the treatment of animals and the well-being of future generations. This is slow, preventative work, but it is also the work that creates the deepest and most lasting change.

We are deeply grateful to our supporters; your belief in this approach makes it possible to reach more children, more schools and more communities each year. With your continued support, ACTAsia will expand its Caring for Life education in the year ahead, ensuring that compassion, responsibility and respect for all living beings are at the heart of learning and at the heart of a more peaceful, compassionate and healthier world for everyone.

Nurturing Kindness and Hope in Rural China

This summer, while schools across China were closing for the holidays, ACTAsia’s classrooms were bursting into life. In August, over one hundred children gathered at Haiyuan County No. 2 Primary School in rural western China for ACTAsia’s Caring for Life Summer Camp, four unforgettable days of creativity, discovery, and compassion.

For many of these children, growing up in an area once marked by severe poverty and limited opportunities, the camp offered more than just fun, it offered hope. Haiyuan County has faced enormous social and environmental challenges, but education and community projects are helping to build a brighter future. ACTAsia’s Summer Camp is proud to be part of that story, helping children develop empathy, confidence, and a sense of responsibility for the world around them.

Guided by the ACTAsia team and volunteer instructors from Ningxia Normal University, the children took part in a vibrant mix of hands-on activities, from making ecological posters and studying “Amazing Animal Abilities” to exploring the biodiversity hidden in the corners of their schoolyard. These experiences helped them see how all living things are connected and why care and respect are at the heart of a compassionate world.

A highlight of the week was the “Understanding Emotions” sessions, where students learned to recognise and express their feelings in healthy ways, skills that help prevent bullying and nurture kindness. Ms. Liu Xiaoya, Head of Programmes at ACTAsia China, emphasised: "Our Summer Camp activities extends beyond knowledge transfer. It focuses on cultivating the diverse social-emotional competencies children need to solve problems, enabling them to treat others kindly, prevent bullying and violence and achieve the learning goal of 'learning to live together'. 

The camp ended with a joyful closing ceremony where every child was celebrated. The most enthusiastic “Pioneer Campers” proudly received ukuleles engraved with the words “Be a Caring Soul for Life.” What began as a group of strangers became a community united by empathy. Each small act of kindness learned at camp has the power to ripple outward, touching families, schools, and the wider community.

Your support makes stories like this possible. Every donation to ACTAsia helps us bring Caring for Life education to more children across China, inspiring the next generation to care for people, animals, and the planet.

Together, we’re nurturing a kinder world — one child at a time.

Links:

• How ACTAsia's Summer Camp helped three remarkable students