A colorful new playground has been unveiled at a mountain kindergarten in Jinping County, Honghe Prefecture, Yunnan Province, just before Children's Day. This marks the 5,000th playground constructed under the Rural Children's Playground public welfare program, a joint initiative launched by Meituan and the One Foundation.

Since the first playground was established in Bijie, Guizhou in September 2020, the project has spanned nearly six years, reaching over 3,000 townships across all 31 provincial-level regions in China. It has directly benefited more than 680,000 children in rural areas.

The success in building over 5,000 playgrounds is supported by a proven public participation model. The core mechanism of Meituan's Rural Children's Playgrounds is "consumption as charity": when customers place orders with participating charitable merchants on Meituan, these merchants automatically donate a portion of the proceeds to the program.

With the active involvement of 1.92 million charitable merchants and 1.578 million individual donors, over 620 million consumers have contributed through their everyday purchases, cumulatively raising more than 520 million yuan in donations.

Regarding fund transparency, Meituan utilizes a self-developed donation tracking system. This allows every donor to precisely locate the specific playground tile they funded, down to the exact kindergarten and spot where it was installed.

Jin Jinping, Associate Professor at Peking University Law School and Director of the Peking University Research Center for Non-Profit Organization Law, notes that this level of visibility goes beyond mere information disclosure. It fosters a sense of participation and rebuilds trust, moving philanthropy away from suspicions of opaque operations towards a system of public trust grounded in digital accountability.

While constructing the playgrounds is a foundational step, the physical infrastructure alone does not automatically yield educational benefits. Beyond hardware installation, the project concurrently focuses on enhancing teacher capabilities. Over the past five-plus years, it has conducted 106 teacher training sessions, reaching more than 6,000 early childhood educators.

As the national focus shifts from poverty alleviation to rural revitalization, there has been a longstanding lack of clear, practical models for how social forces can sustain effective participation in rural public service development. The Meituan Rural Children's Playground initiative offers a replicable pathway: continuous funding flows from routine transactions within a commercial ecosystem, a digital tracking system ensures every donation is traceable, and ongoing investment in teacher training helps translate physical facilities into tangible educational outcomes.

A representative from the Meituan Rural Children's Playground program stated that many children in rural kindergartens across the country still play on hard, unsafe surfaces. Furthermore, numerous young teachers are unable to conduct proper physical education classes due to inadequate facilities. In the next phase, the project will prioritize extending its reach to county-level kindergartens that have not yet been covered and will further expand the scale of teacher training, aiming to synchronize playground construction with the enhancement of educational capacity.