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Case Studies on Asia
Avantage Ventures, a Hong Kong-based advisory firm focused on growing the social enterprise industry in Asia, presents eight case studies of sustainable social enterprises in the Asia Pacific region. These case studies provide evidence of innovative and progressive social enterprises in Asia and present valuable opportunities for evaluating the state of social entrepreneurship in the East.
Aug 31, 2010
Taiwan
Sunshine Foundation
The Challenge
The social sector in Taiwan is relatively young, about two – nearing three – decades old. Prior to the 1980s, the Taiwanese government viewed non-profit groups and civil organisations as threats to its authority and imposed great restrictions on the development of civil society. Underground social organisations existed, of course; but it was only with the lifting of martial law in 1987 that the third sector was truly allowed to flourish and grow. Though thousands of socially-motivated groups have emerged since then – with more than 15,000 membership-supported associations and 3,000 endowment-based foundations – many function within the bounds of traditional Taiwanese concepts of public service: that is, fundraising for philanthropic organisations and providing relief to communities affected by natural disasters. Focus as well as a large proportion of funds are directed towards the victims of Taiwan’s occasional earthquakes, leaving the survivors of less-publicised misfortunes – such as burn victims – marginalised and struggling.
The Entrepreneur and Solution
Anticipating this, a group of motivated, public-minded individuals came together to found the non-profit Sunshine Social Welfare Foundation. Through the Sunshine Foundation, they provide support, rehabilitation and employment opportunities to burn victims and people with facial disfigurement, largely by running car wash and gas stations in Taiwan. Since establishing the Foundation in 1981, they have given professional service and support to more than 8,000 of the facially disfigured. In 2009, their client base was 32% burn survivors, 55% oral cancer survivors and 13% people with other causes of facial impairment.
The founding members were inspired to set up the Sunshine Foundation after hearing an episode of a Taiwanese radio show. The radio host Li Win had read selected excerpts from People Who Shun the Sunshine, a book written by burn survivor Shen Xiao-Ya. Xiao-Ya detailed the pain of her burn accident, the challenges of being facially disfigured, and the suffering of unfair treatment from society after the incident. Xiao-Ya urged the public to take action: either to sympathise with burn survivors’ sudden disabilities and provide them with generous benefits, or to treat burn survivors normally and fairly and give them a fighting chance. Sunshine’s founders decided on the latter and from Xiao-Ya’s book derived the Foundation’s name.
Sunshine’s founders hoped to rehabilitate burn survivors, physically, psychologically and socially, doing so through an efficient vocational rehabilitation model. The facially disfigured are trained and employed in the Sunshine Car Wash Centres, so that they may build up their capacities before re-entering the regular job market. They may also take advantage of the range of services offered by Sunshine’s founders, which include physical rehabilitation services, financial aid, short-term housing services and psychological counselling. All employees, disabled or otherwise, receive health, employment and performance benefits, with salaries at or above minimum wage. The Sunshine Foundation has managed to restore a sense of dignity, confidence and independence in their facially impaired clients and Car Wash employees.
In light of the Sunshine Foundation’s overwhelming success, its founders have expanded the Sunshine Car Wash Centres to take on an additional incubator role for disabled aspiring entrepreneurs. Sunshine employees wishing to establish their own businesses will be able to do so under the Sunshine name, accessing business training and resources from the Centres and furthering the enterprising legacy of the founders of the Sunshine Social Welfare Foundation.
Aug 17, 2010
Japan
Swan Bakery
The Challenge
The Japanese have traditionally believed that social issues should be the responsibility of the government, not to be interfered with by private individuals and businesses. However, the government’s lackadaisical attitude towards social and welfare policy has made these issues an increasingly pressing concern for Japan. This has stirred individuals to take matters into their own hands, providing necessary social and economic support to disadvantaged groups such as the elderly, the homeless and, critically, the disabled. Japan has an estimated disabled population of over six million, including the physically, mentally and intellectually disabled. Though Japan is considering the ratification of the U.N Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which advocates equal opportunities and full participation, a January 2010 government report discovered that nearly 7 in 10 disabled people have faced discrimination and biased treatment in Japan. While many are employed in joint community and sheltered workshops located throughout Japan, their wages remain low and their independence out of reach.
The Entrepreneur and Solution
Mr. Masao Ogura was aware of this issue. He believed greatly in the normalization of life for the disabled, dreaming of a society where those with and without disabilities would live and work together. Working with Mr. Seiichi Takaki, President of the national Takaki Bakery chains, Ogura established the Swan Bakery in Tokyo’s Ginza district in 1998 to achieve his goal. He named the bakery after Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the ugly duckling’s transformation into a beautiful swan, embedding Swan Bakery’s social mission of rehabilitation in its very name.
Through the Swan Bakery, Ogura employed and trained people with disabilities to work for the bakery’s factory and to provide service in its associated Swan Cafes. Determined to empower his employees, Ogura developed a management system in which decision-making was employee driven and positions were tailored to suit each staff’s needs and skills. He provided the disabled with steady incomes, enhancing the self-reliance and independence of Swan employees, who earn up to twice the salary of their fellows at other companies. In establishing the Swan Bakery, Ogura also created an arena in which those with and without disabilities interact on a daily basis. This has served to dispel discriminatory misconceptions and encourage the participation of the disabled in Japanese society. Ogura has furthered this phenomenon by setting up neighbourhood programs. Through these programs, Swan staff volunteer in their local neighbourhoods and surroundings, maintaining strong and close relationships with residents.
Ogura was determined not to demean the disabled. As such, he insisted that Swan Bakery products should be competitive and marketable. His company would not be sustained by the sympathy of the public for its disabled staff, but rather by the preference for its superior quality and service. Swan Bakery is now profitable, with ever growing product lines and revenue streams. To differentiate itself from competitors, Swan Bakery has developed a line of cakes designed for those allergic to eggs and cream. It has also expanded its operations to include e-commerce and online orders, allowing some of its employees to work from home.
Though its entrepreneurial and visionary founder Masao Ogura has passed, the legacy of the Swan Bakery and Cafes continues to grow and flourish. A successful café chain with a strong reputation for high quality baked goods, Swan Bakery now employs more than 280 disabled people in 26 franchises throughout Japan.
Aug 03, 2010
South Korea
The Dasomi Foundation
The Challenge
With the 1997 Asian financial crisis, followed by the global recession a decade later, South Korea’s economy has suffered setbacks. In attempts to fortify and strengthen the country’s economy, the South Korean government has come to see social enterprises as an alternative means of generating jobs and providing social services. This view has come to have a profound impact on the landscape of social entrepreneurship in South Korea, for it has been enshrined in legislation. The Social Enterprise Promotion Act of 2007 defines and recognizes a social enterprise as an organization engaged in commercial activity and pursuing a social mission by “providing social services and creating jobs for the disadvantaged”. In working with these disadvantaged groups – for example, the 500,000 unemployed women in Korea – social enterprises must find a way to accommodate the job creation and social service demands of the government.
The Entrepreneur and Solution
The Dasomi Foundation, which trains and employs disadvantaged women to provide care services to the elderly, is an enterprise that both embraces and transcends these demands. Recognized as South Korea’s first social enterprise, the Dasomi Foundation was established not by an individual entrepreneur who would have had to struggle to meet these strict regulations, but by an innovative public-private partnership between the non-profit Work Together Foundation, the for-profit Kyobo Life Insurance Co. Ltd, and organs of the South Korean government at both the national and local levels.
Recognising their respective strengths, stakeholders take on a different role in this truly efficient business model to fulfil the Korean idea of a social enterprise. Kyobo Life Insurance contributes capital and business expertise to Dasomi. It provided start up capital, operating expenses and education fees up to KRW5.4 billion (USD 4.3 million), as well as management consulting support, to launch Dasomi’s six care centres. The Work Together Foundation handles the provision of social service. It provides management and handles the daily operations of Dasomi, hiring, training and managing the female caregivers. The government supports the employment opportunities created through Dasomi. It provides administrative assistance, social insurance and funds for workers’ wages from its social employment budget. This efficient and collaborative partnership has allowed the Dasomi Foundation to flourish and grow.
Since the enterprise’s establishment, the partnership behind the Dasomi Foundation has helped more than 814 middle-aged women find jobs as caregivers. The three stakeholders have provided specialized patient care education to many women, qualifying them for jobs in hospitals or the Kyobo Dasomi care centres. Their work has empowered disadvantaged women – particularly single mothers or female heads of families – to confidently provide high quality nursing care to the elderly and those in need of rehabilitation.
Dasomi currently has six Kyobo Dasomi care centres in Korea (in Seoul, Incheon, Daejeon, Daegu, Gwangju and Busan), with its free services to low-income patients supported by the fee-based nursing services to other constituents. It currently employs 264 women, empowering them with training and improved working conditions.
Through the Dasomi Foundation, Kyobo Life Insurance, the Work Together Foundation and the South Korean government have developed an effective solution to alleviate the hardships of female unemployment and low-income living conditions.
Jul 20, 2010
Hong Kong
The Senior Citizens Home Safety Association
The Challenge
Though there is yet to be a commonly accepted definition of social entrepreneurship in the city, most social enterprises in Hong Kong are focused on providing assistance and services to marginalized groups, lost in the depths of the city’s dense population. These disadvantaged groups range from the physically disabled to ex-offenders to the elderly.
Support for the elderly, in particular, is weak. The elderly constitute nearly 13% of Hong Kong residents; of these, a substantial number live alone (11.6%) or only with their fellow elderly spouse (21.2%). Although public health care and support services are available, the rapidly aging population and increasing proportion of elderly indicate that demand far outstrips support.
Oftentimes, for reasons of physical immobility, many of the elderly – especially those living alone – are unable to access such public services and suffer greatly at home. In 1996, more than one hundred elderly citizens, alone and unattended, died from colds due to a sudden and unexpected cold spell in the city.
The Entrepreneur and Solution
In response, a group of dedicated individuals – led by current executive director Timothy Ma – got together and founded the Senior Citizens Home Safety Association (SCHSA) to address the health, care and emergency needs of local elderly living alone. Applying more than thirty-two years of social service experience, Ma and his SCHSA team provide services and care to approximately 2.5 million members of the elderly community in Hong Kong. They developed numerous response and welfare services, from a 24-hour “Personal Emergency Link” support service to an emotional counseling hotline to the provision of coats, quilts and other materials.
Since founding the SCHSA, as of May 2010, they have brought about 68,844 home visits, received 4,148,385 Personal Emergency help requests and saved more than 183,000 lives. Though initially intended for the elderly, SCHSA services are open to anyone with a residential phone line in Hong Kong.
Supplemented by his fundraising efforts, Ma sustains the SCHSA primarily through service charges, which constitute eighty percent of its budget. To maximize scope, Ma set a low and affordable rate for the SCHSA’s services. For a mere HKD $100 (USD $12.8) a month, service users are connected to the 24-hour Personal Emergency Link Centre via a button on a device in their home. Trained operators and social workers respond to pleas, calling an ambulance center for emergency medical assistance, faxing medical records to appropriate hospitals or even providing general assurance and counseling. The call centre alone receives an average of 2,500 calls a day, proving that the SCHSA is meeting the dire need that Ma saw in Hong Kong.
In true entrepreneurial spirit, Ma emphasizes that the SCHSA must remain innovative and sensitive to their customers’ needs. Blending technology, customer insight and community collaboration, he and the SCHSA worked with mobile service provider CSL and mSolution Consultants to develop the new “Mobile Link Service”. This service, conducted through a portable device, has the additional feature of tracking the location of its subscribers, should help be needed when outside of the home. This allows elderly residents to enjoy an active, outdoor lifestyle without forfeiting assured access to help.
Ma, along with two hundred SCHSA staff and more than nine hundred volunteers, works to fill a gap and address the inefficiencies in services typically provided publicly. By providing extensive and holistic care to the elderly, Ma assures the elderly that “"living alone [is] without fear, caring for the elderly is here."
