VA
Insights

To Venture Avenue’s dear friends:

As we are all set to box all the great memories in 2018, and greet the new prosperities and excitement in 2019, Venture Avenue would like to thank all our friends, partners and family for your great support. 

Taking the great momentum from the previous year, 2018 has been another growth year for Venture Avenue. Some key milestones in China’s non-profit space include:

• Led the 5-year strategic planning for two leading public foundations: China Population and Welfare Foundation and China Children and Teenager Fund (VA therefore have provided strategic planning for 50% of the 10 largest public foundations in China, an impact on total RMB2 billion philanthropic investment annually)
• Advised the founding strategies for Rare Conservation’s China Impact Fund (for agribusiness) and Asian Development Bank’s China Inclusive Business Impact Fund (Inner Mongolia)
• Continued strategic support on family foundations including crystalizing the Lao Niu Foundation’s core values, building employee capacity assessment tool to elevate the  organizational effectiveness
• Incubated a start-up social venture for a global business leader in environment science, from market entry to on-going business management support, and witnessed its growth from zero to a team of 30+ service professionals
• Venture Avenue’s Social Innovation Hub at Tsinghua University opened a public class “Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship” and received very positive feedbacks from students

In the meantime, Venture Avenue’s business consulting arm continued its tremendous funding support on exercising our social mission. Venture Avenue not only successfully maintained, but also expanded our business with long-term partners in automotive, environment and life science sectors. We are especially proud of our long-term partnership with Daimler China’s after-sales teams:  VA’s deep engagement with Daimler not only subsidized Venture Avenue business in non-profit sector, but also provided a great platform for VA team members to stay on the edge of management consulting and to build our blended cross-sector expertise.

What have been driving Venture Avenue? The people and the shared spirit of entrepreneurship. It is the visible impact, the sense of ownership and the fulfillment of personal growth that have made us unique. A great case in example to exemplify our pride in 2018, was the emergence of VA’s first internally incubated social business, the “Horae”, which aspires to find the deepest organizational values to drive business strategies and people effectiveness. In 2018, Horae has successfully conducted 10 value workshops in both for-profit and non-profit sectors. The founder and a Principal of Venture Avenue, Cherry Zhu, was nominated as the “Asia 21 young leader”. 

12 months from today, perhaps the very top line of my 2019 New Year Letter would be: Venture Avenue has “greenized” our organization to nurture intra-entrepreneurship, with self-propelling soil that everyone in VA is most proud of!

Happy New Year!

Robin Zhang

Founder, Venture Avenue

Dec 26, 2018