On Sep. 12th, the Initial Results Release Conference for Amway Charity Foundation's Spring Sprout Project and the International Exchange of Rural Poor Children's Nutrition Improvement Model were held in Changsha City, Hunan Province. By the end of Oct. 2013, the Spring Sprout Project will cover 106 counties in 13 provinces, build over 1,700 Spring Sprout Kitchens, train over 2,000 kitchen administrators, and impact nearly a million children. These results indicate that ACF has surpassed its goal originally made in 2011 of building 1000 Spring Sprout Kitchens in three years. In the next two years, ACF plans to build another 1200 Spring Sprout Kitchens and cover all the 22 areas listed in the Nutrition Improvement Plan for Rural Compulsory Education Students drafted by the central government.

Gu Xiulian, Vice Chairman of the 10th NPC and Director of China National Committee for the Care of Children (CNCCC) attended the conference and spoke highly of the "Spring Sprout Model". Gan Chee Eng, Chairman of Amway Charity Foundation and President of Amway Greater China, officials and experts from the State Council Working Committee on Women and Children, the Ministry of Education, the Institute for Nutrition and Food Safety of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and Save the Children UK also attended the event.

During the conference, ACF and CNCCC co-launched "Spring Sprout Nutrition Service Campaign", which aims to widely promote the standards for Spring Sprout Kitchen equipment and facilities, pool together resources to popularize the "Spring Sprout Model" and build a new platform to sustainably address malnutrition of rural children in poverty.

ACF and CNCCC Co-launching "Spring Sprout Nutrition Service Campaign"

A survey conducted by the Institute of Child and Adolescent Health at Peking University found that in 2011 students from a Spring Sprout Project school showed improvements in muscles, bones, body fat percentage, internal organs and other physical fitness indicators (such as BMI, height and chest circumference index and Rohrer's index). Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) tests showed that 50.8% of students from Project schools were evaluated as "excellent" or "good", higher than the 41.7% of those from non-project schools.

In 2013, upon ACF's invitation, experts from the State Council Working Committee on Women and Children, the Chinese Nutrition Society, and the Children Development Research Center of CNCCC designed a special evaluation model according to the specifics of the Spring Sprout Project, and evaluated all of the 754 Spring Sprout Kitchens built during 2011 and 2012. The evaluation results revealed that the standard operation rate of kitchen equipment was at 97.36%, 95.73% of the students spoke highly of the meal quality, and the overall satisfaction rate was at 96%.

Spring Sprout Project was jointly launched by ACF and CNCCC in 2011, which aims to improve nutrition for children, especially left-behind children, in the poor rural areas of Central and Western China by building Spring Sprouts Kitchens for their boarding schools and thus providing them with equal development opportunities. Spring Sprout Project is the biggest kitchen category charity project in China with the widest coverage and largest number of benefited students. In 2012, Spring Sprout Project was honored with the "China Charity Award".