Archive for Inspiring Stories

Asia’s Social Changemakers: Meixin Li, founder Gift of Hope

Meixin Li is an outstanding young social entrepreneur based in Beijing, China.   She has recently founded Gift of Hope, a social enterprises which works with disabled artisans and sells their beautiful handicrafts nationwide.  We have caught up with her to learn more about her and her venture: How do you make a positive impact? [...]

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 [...]

Involving Youth in HIV/ AIDS education in China

FYSE and i-genius the leading platform for social entrepreneurs, have recently launched a new interview series highlighting inspiring young entrepreneurs from Asia. Here our interview with Lily Wang, founder of the Chinese University Students Union for Health Education: Lily, could you tell us a bit more about yourself, what is your background? I am Lily, [...]

In the Bangladesh slums, building leaders not extremists

We had previously reported about FYSE’s Paragon fellow Ejaj Ahmad, a young social entrepreneur who founded the Bangladesh Youth Leadership Centre. Alaka Dhara Halder, a graduate of the Bangladesh Youth Leadership Center and now a member of Princeton University’s Class of 2014, recently wrote about her experience in The Washington Post: The young rickshaw-puller had [...]

Watch Banking On Change: An inspirational short film

Two-thirds of India’s population of a billion people live in the nation’s 600,000 villages. Despite India’s economic growth, the disparities between wealth and poverty are enormous. Many villagers migrate to the cities in search of work and end up begging on the streets. South Indian bank manager J S Parthiban set out to do something [...]

Asia’s Young Changemakers: Manoj Vasudevan

More and more companies are looking at the bottom billion, the million of poor people, worldwide as customers for the products and services. Not many however, look at the poor as pool of talented yet underdeveloped employee pool as Manoj does. Despite India’s many advances, there are eight million educated unemployed youth in India’s countryside. [...]

Change the World for the price of a few coffee drinks

3 amazing young social entrepreneurs and FYSE Paragon fellows from Asia Pacific have been selected to attend the upcoming Unreasonable Institute and you can help them to impact millions of lives! The Unreasonable Institute is a social entrepreneurship incubator created to host summer institutes where a confluence of young, brilliant, social entrepreneurs undergo rigorous and [...]

Asia’s Young Changemakers: Ketan Deshpante

A student finds the entrance test to an engineering college a never-to-be-forgotten struggle. Most others would simply grumble. Not Kedar Deshpande. He turned the problem into an opportunity, producing a primer for fellow sufferers — a sort of “all you want to know about…” booklet containing the low-down on engineering colleges and their entrance tests. [...]

India’s young entrepreneurs see opportunity in slump

A little more than a year ago, Rajesh Razdan quit his cushy, well-paying job with a global cellphone company here to launch a small start-up that would offer a slew of new services to cellphone users. India’s recent economic boom, he said, was the perfect setting in which to become an entrepreneur. For his new [...]