Hong Liu

Liu Hong is the executive director of Peer Experience Exchange Rostrum (PEER), a Beijing-based NGO promoting educational equity to high school students in rural China. As a practitioner with more than 15 years of experience working with China's rural youth since co-founding the organization in 2007, he developed PEER's capacity to support 10 actively running in-school learning spaces, provide summer and winter programs and semester-long project-based learning courses to more than 10,000 students from county-level high schools in Hunan, Guangxi, and Guizhou provinces. His organization also maintains a teacher support network, empowers volunteers through service-learning, develops courses on sustainable development, STEAM, media studies and humanities suited for rural students, engages in public advocacy, and conducts action-research projects to better understand and serve rural students. Liu Hong received his BA in Social Studies and MA in Regional Studies: East Asia from Harvard University in 2010. Prior to working full-time with PEER, he worked with the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies in Peking University from 2010 to 2013. He was awarded the Ginkgo Fellowship from 2017 to 2020 for his social entrepreneurship. His research interests include community and service-based education, participatory action research, social and emotional learning, career pathways, as well as the impact of liberal education on China's rural youth. While at SCCEI, he hopes to contribute from a practitioner's perspective, and work on methods to combine practice with research.