Tong Shunyu (right) shakes hands with visiting students at the opening ceremony of the photo exhibition in Nanjing on August 23 (COURTESY OF gong1chuang1.org)

On August 23, a special photo exhibition began at the Xianfeng Bookstore in Nanjing City, east China's Jiangsu Province. All the exhibits, including 308 photos, diaries and paper-cutting works, came from 10 students at the Nanjing School for the Blind.

"I was moved to tears when I saw a group of pupils shaking hands and chatting with those visually impaired students," He Jun, one of the exhibition organizers, recalled.

"At that moment, it seemed to everyone who took part in the exhibition that miracles really happen," He told Beijing Review.

An idea 'by accident'

In February this year, He Jun, a 20-something student in the international business master's program at Nanjing University, read a notice about the Yi Nuan Zhong Hua program (literally "Warming China through charitable activities") sponsored by Google China.

"The program was designed for university students across the country. It encouraged us to pay more attention to social problems and participate in charity programs with innovation," He told Beijing Review. "I was excited, because it provided a good opportunity for my friends and me to lend a helping hand."

According to the program rules, all participants, as an individual or a team, had to submit a written project proposal. After three rounds of evaluation, the final 32 proposals received prize money (ranging from 10,000 to 80,000 yuan each) to finance the project during summer vacation.

"At first, our team had eight members. We often held small discussions about the proposal," said He. "There were three steps before the final edition. First, we chose visually impaired students as our charity target, because they don't usually receive much attention. Second, we set three major goals--to improve communication between the visually impaired and other communities, to attract more attention to their situation and to strengthen people's charity awareness. Finally, we tried our best to make the proposal as innovative as possible."

"Believe it or not, the idea of teaching visually impaired students to take pictures came to my mind by accident," said He, an amateur photographer.

"Most of my teammates were passionate about photography as well. We thought it might be a good idea if the visually impaired could share their inside world by taking photos."

"To be honest, some people sneered at our proposal, because they thought it was impossible for the visually impaired to take pictures," said He. "Of course, there was no such example in China before, but we viewed some websites of foreign professional photographers with visual impairment. Their works were truly impressive."

"Innovation means doing something that no one else dares to do or has never done before," He added.

Practice makes perfect

In June, He's team proposal, entitled "Feeling the Inside World of Visually Impaired Students," made it onto the final list out of more than 6,000 proposals nationwide, winning a grant of 31,240 yuan (about $4,465).