China Social Entrepreneurs

On my recent visit to Hong Kong, I was able to see the amount of excitement and interest in social entrepreneurism. One had to assume there's a lot going on in China, too, but it's hard to connect with.

I just received an update from KK Tse entitled The Most Inspiring Story from the Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship, talking about 1KG More, a social enterprise that implemented Voluntourism: combining backpacking with delivering books and other gifts for rural Chinese children. Their latest venture:

Twin books are a pair of selected books for children. If one book is sold in cities, another book will be donated to rural children. The owners of these two books will become a “twin”. Through the twin code in the book, the children in cities can find contact information of rural children on Twin Book’s website and make communication through letters with rural children. The twin book project sold over 2000 fairy story books in 2007 and more than 1000 rural students benefited from it. Now 1KG More has five full-time staff and a stable group of volunteers. In April 2008, 1KG More registered as a company and aimed to operate as a social enterprise model.

When I followed up with KK, I found out the story had originated on with an article on the Global Links Initiative entitled Voluntourism - A New Kind of Holiday. Turns out that GLI is busy linking up the world with more information about social entrepreneurship: quite cool!