Youwei Library, established in June, 2012, is the first non-governmental public library in Zhejiang Province.

Our vision is to ‘cultivate life-long learners for counties and towns in China; our goal is to tackle the inequality in educational resources of cities and towns, to facilitate individuals’s growth in interpersonal connections, cultural accumulation and social participation, and to involve more people so as to co-create a prosperous local educational and cultural ecosystem.

Youwei defines itself as a charity-oriented educational organization with people-oriented and plural values, presented as a library.

Youwei currently has a collection of over 30,000 books and over 3,500 registered readers—4% of the main town population. The annual average amount of books read by registered readers is 14.7, far exceeding the national annual average, which is 2.5, reaching the level of reading popularity in moderately developed countries.

Beside providing conventional lending service, Youwei Library serves as the organizer of diverse reading-promotional and other cultural activities.

Since its opening in June 2012, Youwei has been open for over 1,8000 hours, has lent over 9,5000 books in total, engaged over 16,7400 people in reading, organized over 1,200 diverse cultural activities with over 40,000 participants, and started numorous volunteer groups including Youwei Volunteer Group, middle school student volunteer society, teacher volunteer group and Women’s Club.

Since 2013, there have been approximately 1,000 volunteers helping wth building Youwei, including over 500 registered student volunteers, 80 picture book storytelling volunteer teachers and quality-oriented curriculum teachers’ group, over 220 university volunteers from across the country, 138 members in Women’s Club and over 100 executive volunteers. The Youwei-seed is budding vigorously thanks to the contribution of Youweiers.