Archive for Asia

Asia’s Social Changemakers: Charlene Kotwall, founder the Mustard Seed Workshop

As a change agent, Charlene Kotwall is fighting systemic poverty by providing small grass root entities with the necessary business resources to globalize their product’s exposure. Her Mustard Seed Workshop now works with  partners in eight different countries and provides customers with the opportunity to purchase “Gifts that Bless”. How do you make a positive [...]

Join our team

Passionate about social entrepreneurship and interested to work with the most outstanding social entrepreneurs? Join us! We are currently accepting applications for positions during winter/ spring 2012. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until positions are filled. This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience to gain development experience at a young and dynamic organization with [...]

Asia’s Social Changemakers: Chen Yanqiong, founder: Lanxuanzhijia

In recent month the value and impact of entrepreneurship education in universities has been a hot topic to discuss.  Chen Yanqiong highlights that exposing students to social entrepreneurship during their studies can have a significant impact on their future career choice. Chen participated at CEIBS Social Enterprise Competition with her idea to improve elderly care [...]

Asias Young Changemakers: Holly Chang, founder: Golden Bridges

In 2006, Holly Chang sold her home and belongings in America and moved to China were she invested her life savings to start Golden Bridges, a nonprofit promoting mutual understanding between China and the West through charitable projects. She is currently working on a new initiative called Project Pengyou to support the missions of the [...]

Asia’s Social Changemakers: Charlene Wang, founder Tranquil Tuesdays

After working for the US foreign service for 6 years Charlene Wang founded Tranquil Tuesdays, a Beijing based social firm selling tea and artisan teaware.  Founded on her passion for tea and her commitment for women empowerment she has build the venture to train and hire Chinese women who are having difficulty finding a job [...]

Asia’s Social Changemakers: Ryan Dick – Founder of GIGA

In 2007, Ryan Dick came to Shanghai as the award winner of Henry Luce and lectured on urban planning and architectural design in Tongji University during 2007-2008. After joining architectural firm AOO by chance and he found that his environmental protection ideas met the one of Raefer—founder of A00, so they set up GIGA. GIGA [...]

What does investing mean for the field of social entrepreneurship?

It is time to clear up some confusion in terminologies. Now the world of finance is complicated, so we’ll be simplistic and not go into detail on the different financial options that exist. Let’s start at the beginning: Traditional Philanthropy: Giving money to help make a difference -normally a short-term, tangible impact. Strategic Philanthropy: Through [...]

Part 2: ready social enterprises for mainstream investors

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is not to invest in social enterprises, it is to ready social enterprises for mainstream investors First, a caveat: not all social enterprises can or should make a decent financial return for their investors. Their business model may not be built to make decent financial returns, and [...]

Part 1: The scalable solution to social enterprises’ financial problems: multinational enterprises

There are now dozens of venture philanthropy funds, or funds of that nature (that invest in social enterprises with the aim of gaining a return on their investment in addition to the social or environmental returns). They are scouting out possible investments across the globe, looking for enterprises that need funding as well as other [...]

Announcing next round of delegates for ASVA 2011!

With more and more outstanding young people joining ASVA 2011 we are excited to share with you some of the amazing people coming to Hong Kong! Mark works with an international NGO in Beijing, China and started the social enterprise Chuang, whi will provide scial entrepreneurship education to Chinese students! Glory from Singapore started the [...]