Michelle Teope-Shen: A foreign counselor in the small “United Nations”

Currently, the Chamber has a panel of 12 counselors, 5 of whom are members of the Ronghua Neighborhood Committee, while the other 7 counselors represent the foreign views of this community and are from different countries and regions including Taiwan, Japan, the Netherlands, the Philippines and Australia.

What kind of topics will be discussed in this small “United Nations”? What kind of roles do the foreign counselors play in this Chamber? How do they feel about the changes in China since the Reform and Opening up? To find the answers to these questions, our reporter had an interview with Michelle Teope-Shen, one of these foreign counsels, who is from the Philippines and was one of the winners of the 2014 Shanghai International Excellence Awards; just one of the many awards she has won for her contributions to voluntary and charitable causes.

Chinese and foreign residents join hands to build a harmonious community

The Civic Chamber, since its establishment, has created a unique mode of community governance, which lets Chinese and foreign residents work together to manage the place where they live, and has been a forum for residents to make suggestions and build a civilized community. The achievements included the idea, which was raised by a Dutch resident named Jennifer, to allocate a space in the Gubei Civic Center to host residents’ personal exhibitions, and the formulation of the “Civilized Pet-Keeping Convention”, in accordance with the international community’s common rules.

As a senior counselor, Michelle mentioned that what the Civic Chamber focuses on is to solve the difficulties residents meet in their daily lives. For example, the counselors have been talking about garbage classification during the last few months. Michelle herself understood the necessity to sort waste but she found no relevant reminder or guidelines in each residential building. To address that problem, she suggested that each floor should post guidelines about garbage classification and assign two separate rubbish bins for dry and wet garbage if it is possible.

The principles which guide the operation of the Civic Chamber could be summarized as follows. Gubei Residents raise their own proposal, and the Civic Chamber focuses on reviewing them. Then the party organization approves it and relevant departments eventually pay the bill. Thanks to this democratic and efficient mode of operation, Michelle’s proposal quickly won the support of relevant departments and was implemented far more expediently than expected.