Recently, VA was invited by the British Council to conduct a survey among its “Skills for Social Entrepreneurs Program” trainees, which intended to reflect the status quo of China’s social enterprise (SE) sector. Among the participating organizations, there were 107 SEs and social entrepreneurial projects, and 59 organizations that plan to apply SE models.
Bill Gates emphasized the important role of philanthropic evaluation in the open letter from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at the beginning of 2013. Coincidentally, social organization evaluation has become a hot topic in the past two years as being carried out at both national and local level. In October, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation held a symposium with the theme of national evaluation. VA was invited to speak on national evaluation indicators. In this article, we will elaborate on this topic and share with you problems and trends of evaluation in China’s third sector.
Yu Venture Philanthropy (Yu VP) has engaged in the “Skills of Social Entrepreneurs” program Social Investment (SI) platform initiated by the British Council together with other 5 VP organizations since August this year. The SI platform has initiated a social enterprise (SE) contest and offers the winners with training, mentorship and access to VP. While SEs experience a rapid development in China since 2009, lack of access to finance has become one common key barrier for SEs to scale up. The SI platform is intended to tackle this bottleneck by directly connecting social investors with SEs and thus effectively promote the development of SE and SI in China.
Recent years have witnessed the continued exposure of product safety and environmental issues at home and abroad. As there is growing public concern for product safety, corporations’ supply chain are faced with higher requirements.
Special children have always been one of the key focus areas of public welfare sector. To provide help for these children has also been the target of many institutions. Currently, many NGOs and social enterprises in China have made many creative attempts in this area, achieving significant social impact.
There are three “90-10” rules in the field of training for commercial organizations. Over 90% of employees’ learning does not come from formal training but from outside the classroom. Over 90% of employees’ improvement do not owe to the training department but direct supervisors. Over 90% of a company’s problems cannot be tackled by training.
In May this year, Venture Avenue in partnership with the Boston Consulting Group Social Impact team kicked off one year of hands-on consultancy and incubation services to the two winning social enterprises (SE) of Xinhu-Yu Venture Philanthropy Award. They are Beijing Migrant Workers’ Home (北京工友之家) and Shanghai Puki Coordination Agency for the Hearing-Impaired (上海小笼包聋人协力事务所).
China is still far from being a fairyland for social investment. Despite of significantly increased public acceptance of the concept and explosive increase of social enterprise start-ups in last 5 years, current social enterprise sector still faces a big challenge for both social entrepreneurs and social investors: how to scale up.
In Taiwan, TC Bank became the most well known bank with three very philanthropic commercials. With no marketing of the bank’s name, the commercials simply tell common people’s uncommon dreams, which touched thousands of people’s hearts.
Environmental protection has long been a key topic for NGOs. But recently, we have seen an increasing number of young generation and NGO leaders testing the social enterprise (SE) model. Unlike deep-pocket commercial companies, majority of the SEs are working on simple solutions that can engage the general public (see charts below).