When we look at the problem and the issue in the social and environmental area, the younger generation do have a stronger passion than the older generation in starting up social enterprises.

We need to combine the new trends in this area and leverage the different kinds of stakeholders in this area. Then, we need to build up a much better platform for them to talk to each other, work with each other, build up the partnerships, and even build up business partnerships between the companies and the social entrepreneurs.

Absolutely. There’s some really interesting insights there Niven, thanks for sharing those. I’m really keen to hear a bit more about some of the inspiring projects or initiatives that you’ve come across which you believe are creating some great positive social change?

If we talk about new initiatives recently, I think they are 100% related to COVID-19. The COVID-19 outbreak has already caused quite serious economic lock down, but fortunately in Taiwan, the economic activity, school and entertainment support has seemingly not been affected significantly. That is a good thing for Taiwan, and Taiwan is a quite unique situation anyway. We are lucky, but we still need to do something related to COVID-19. To be frankly speaking, even Taiwan has only just had a small impact by COVID-19. But, because of uncertainty, a lot of initiatives and a lot of effort for the first part of 2020, for example, the big companies’ CSR programs and ESG initiatives became a little bit more conservative. A lot of social enterprise businesses indeed were impacted because of uncertainty. Under the support of a small size enterprise administration, this government agency is under the Ministry of Economic Affairs here in Taiwan. At KPMG, we have welcomed a new initiative called Power Taiwan Gift Boxes. What it means is we convened a bunch of social enterprises and we invited 26 social enterprises. They worked together and then KPMG provided supporting resources based on their product and service, and then we designed the Power Taiwan Gift Box.

There are at least four, five or six different kinds of products supplied by those 26 social enterprises, and then we designed four kinds of Power Taiwan Gift Boxes. Then we promoted and introduced those Gift Boxes to the big companies, banks or financial institutions, and even government agencies.

They encourage those kinds of key stakeholders to purchase the Power Taiwan Gift Boxes, to represent their support for those social enterprises during COVID-19. It is quite a warm and inspiring initiative.

Up until now, we already have more than 1000 boxes. The social enterprises and other key players related to this Power Taiwan Gift Box are all very excited because based on the promotion, we see a lot of positive feedback from those big companies, government agencies or opinion leaders that is completely based on the impact of a COVID-19. We would like to deliver our positive messages during even a difficult time, and we still have a lot of people in society that are willing to support social enterprises.

The second initiative, is we work with the Taipei Government to support Taipei City social enterprises. What we are doing right now is we are building up a new platform, and we are inviting big companies to the platform to provide [and share] their problems. Then we invite a social entrepreneur to understand they’re big companies and big problems, and then we invite those social entrepreneurs to provide a solution. It’s something like a problem identifier and solution provider, and a matchmaking plan. That is quite an interesting initiative, and it’s undergoing at this moment. We’ve invited six or seven big companies to join the initiative. Then we have more than 20-30 social entrepreneurs in Taipei City, and with the support over the Taipei City Government, we are going to launch a ceremony.

This ceremony is also a learning by sharing event, to see how big companies can work with social enterprises based on the problem identified by the big company and solution identified by the social entrepreneur.

This is kind of new for me, but it’s also a partnership program, and we anticipate that we can come out with some very good and inspiring successful cases of this kind of partnership.

There are some great initiatives there Niven, and I must say I’ve always been really encouraged by the high delegation numbers in participation from Taiwanese delegates at the Social Enterprise World Forum each year. I always hear fantastic stories of all the great initiatives happening, both across the private and public sectors in your country.

To finish off Niven, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

At this moment, I don’t have any books I can recommend, but I do have some resources, especially for what we are doing and also our partner organisations across the Asia Pacific. The first one, is we are organising the 2020 Asia Pacific Social Innovation Summit, from September 21st-25th. You can get access to English information through the website for the details about this social innovation summit. The second one is for the in the Asia Pacific.