Zigen Fund’s Harvard Charity Concert Features World-Class Opera Singers and Chorus

By David Li, bostonese.com

In the afternoon of March 3, 2013, Zigen Fund will present a Charity Concert at Sanders Theatre at Harvard University. This concert features award-winning opera singers Guang Yang and Jing Wei. Boston Eastern Heritage Chorus(BEHC) and its conductor Wanjun Qiao, the recent winners of 2012 World Choral Festival at Vienna’s Golden Hall of the Musikverein Concert, will also join this charity concert. Tickets for the concert can be ordered at: zigen2013.eventbrite.com.

The Zigen Fund, with its Chinese meaning as nourishing the roots, is dedicated to supporting people in poverty, initiating and facilitating projects addressing unmet basic needs, particularly education and primary health care, for women and children in rural China, as well as preservation of the environment and local culture. All proceeds from the concert will be donated to the Zigen Fund. The 1997 winner of the prestigious BBC Singer of the World Competition in Cardiff and a world-class opera singer, Ms.Guang Yang returns to Boston with a new selection of beautiful songs and her ever-lasting love to charity. Ms. Yang has recently held personal concerts in China and performed on world-wide stages. Her talents are highly acclaimed. “Whenever she was onstage, the whole production moved several notches upward.” (Sarah Bryan Miller, St Louis Post Dispatch, March 7, 04)

Other artists include Mr. Xiaoyi Duan, a local favorite and a superiorly gifted and trained singer whose brilliant voice wins audiences’ hears, Ms. Jing Wei, the winner of Met Opera House Vocal Music Contest Prize and Ms. Liwen Wang, a Boston soprano vocalist. Another tenor is Mr. Maxwell Li, whose powerful voice gained him a place in the winners’ circle of the Luciano Payvarotti International Vocal Competition in Philadelphia. The Zigen Fund is a U.S. based charity with over 20 years history. Zigen’s projects aim to support people in the poorest rural areas of China and poverty-stricken migrant workers with an emphasis on equal access to education and development, especially for children and women. Our ongoing projects include basic education, primary health care, environmentally sound technologies and preservation of local cultures. The Zigen Fund is dedicated to supporting people in poverty, initiating and facilitating projects addressing unmet basic needs, particularly education and primary health care, for women and children in rural China, as well as preservation of the environment and local culture. Over past 25 years, Zigen has established wide grassroots network in rural China weaving 200 villages and migrant worker communities, provided subsidy to 90,000 students, and established sister organizations in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Ms. Pat Yang is the President of the Zigen Fund. In 1988, Ms. Yang was one of the founders of the Zigen Fund. In the past 25 years, Ms. Yang has been actively engaged in supporting education and village development in rural China and migrant worker communities in Chinese cities. In 1996, she also founded the China Zigen Education and Development Association in China which was one of the very few registered independent national NGO in China at that time. Pat has actively participated in programs and organizational development of Zigen. In 2012, because of a series of important articles and proposals initiated by Zigen, China’s Department of Education reexamined its centralized policy on “Rural Schools Closing and Combining”. Zigen founder, Ms. Pat Yang, was thus awarded the “Public Interest Watcher,” and was named one of “The Most Influential Chinese in 2012” by China Newsweek magazine.

Please visit www.zigenfund.org (US) and www.zigen.org.cn (China) for more info about Zigen Fund. This charity concert is co-presented by Harvard Chinese Students and Scholars' Association (Harvard CSSA).