Dear Friends & Colleagues:

I would like to share some very good news. On October 28, our close collaborators at the Hupan Modou Foundation were awarded the WISE award in education for their incredible work upscaling and expanding the Parenting-the-Future project. The Hupan Modou Foundation was founded by the 12 women partners of the Alibaba Group, including our close friend and collaborator Lucy Peng, an original co-founder of Alibaba. 

The WISE award is the highest international award given in the field of education—you can think of it as a sort of Nobel Prize for Education. The award this year was given to Lucy and her colleagues at Hupan Modou for their stunning work designing and rolling out the Parenting-the-Future parental training intervention in a way that no one has ever done before: They have created a model that can be implemented by the government at the county level and upscaled, efficiently and effectively. It provides the highest quality of parental training to rural families so that their children can develop healthily in terms of cognition, language ability, and social-emotional, and motor skills. 

Congratulations Lucy and colleagues!

This new model of Parenting-the-Future has not only been life changing for the thousands of babies in the Hupan Modou’s project counties in Shaanxi and Jiangxi, it also holds the promise for touching the lives of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of young children across rural China as the project is scaled up in collaboration with the government in the months and years to come.

While the Hupan Modou Foundation team deserves this award in every sense of the word, Lucy reached out to me personally with this message:

"Creation and support of Parenting the Future through a public‒private partnership have been critical. We could not have done this without the aid of our partners, including the Executive Leadership Training Center of the National Health Commission, the Center for Experimental Economics in Education at Shaanxi Normal University, local government organizations, business leaders, and experts in academia, especially Stanford/REAP. 

“The contribution of research experts has been invaluable. Since 2012, the research team has designed the original curriculum and conducted several Randomized Controlled Trials which has proved the effectiveness. Hupan Modou Foundation joined this project in 2017, based on previous work, our role has been a explorer of a “Government-led model” hoping to facilitate Parenting the Future to be a an efficient, replicable and sustainable project. Parenting the Future is leading to superior development outcomes of young rural children in China."

We thank Lucy—our friend, colleague, and collaborator—for these generous words. REAP’s ultimate dream for all of our projects is that once we can show effectiveness, it can be upscaled nationwide. The Hupan Modou Foundation has taken up this mantle and helped our dream come true. We are thrilled that civil society and government are translating our research evidence into actionable programs and, with new innovations and creativity, are successfully scaling them up.

Congratulations, again, Lucy and the Hupan Modou team. We are so very proud to have played a role in Parenting the Future!

Sincerely,

Scott Rozelle
Director, Rural Education Action Program 
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Stanford University