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GLOBAL INVESTOR 2.12 — 44 Social entrepreneurship Getting back to work Returning to work after a long illness can be difficult. In particular, people with a history of mental illness face workplace hurdles that may seem insurmountable. Deborah Wan Lai Yau describes how helping these patients to reintegrate through social entrepreneurship benefits everyone involved. Deborah Wan Lai Yau, President, World Federation of Mental Health Listen to this article on Global Investor’s Knowledge Platform: www.credit-suisse.com/globalinvestor Deborah Wan Lai Yau has devoted her career as a social worker to assisting patients who are social entrepreneurship concept to Hong Kong as early as 1994. In 2008, she was recognized with the Outstanding Women Entrepreneurs Award, conferred by the Hong Kong Women Professionals and Entrepreneurs Association. I have always had enormous respect for patients recovering from mental illness for their ability and willingness to return to work. Given training opportunities, they perform as well as people without mental illness, and are also able to maintain a healthy lifestyle and mentally stable outlook. Our society often fails to appreciate that people recovering from mental illness represent social capital, and thus tends to view them negatively. At the time, I was CEO of a Hong Kong non-profit organization focusing on mental health – the New Life Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association. Consequently, I devoted myself to giving a new lease on life to people who have suffered episodes of mental illness. In the 1980s, my team and I concentrated on developing community psychiatric rehabilitation services, mainly residential care and vocational rehabilitation, such as sheltered workshops. Once these services were well developed, we realized that many residents and sheltered workers were not able to take the next step owing to a lack of confidence in facing the public, and stress related to adjusting once again to work. So, I organized a pilot project to set up a daily market stall in the community for selling Photo: Grischa Rüschendorf
GLOBAL INVESTOR 2.12 — 45 “My ultimate aim is to encourage small businesses.” fresh vegetables. These came from a sheltered farm workshop that was founded in 1994 for about 160 workers with psychiatric disabilities. We called it “simulated business” because it was intended to resemble as closely as possible a real work situation in which persons with psychiatric disabilities could interact with regular customers. We provided a job coach to help the former patients to be salespeople. The project was well received by both neighboring stall owners and customers. This successful effort led to us setting up convenience stores in hospitals from 1997. Three years earlier, we secured a public cleaning contract in parks and the city’s indoor games hall and in 1999 also the first licensed restaurant in the games hall. These projects won numerous awards for best practices in reintegration. After witnessing the impressive results of providing training and employment opportunities for persons with psychiatric disabilities in these projects, the government subsequently set up a fund to provide seed money to social enterprises. Balancing objectives the key to success Social enterprise has two main objectives. One, obviously, is social, and in my own experience, it consists in training and employment opportunities for persons with a history of mental illness. The other objective is to sustain a business with profits generated and to use the surplus to create other new social enterprises or to expand the existing one. The directors of this limited company do not share in the profits. Balancing social and business objectives is more difficult than running a business with profit sharing, as the two objectives are entirely different. Sometimes, the managers focused more on the social objective, and the enterprise failed to produce sufficient income (neither the directors nor the managers were former patients). It is the combination of both types of expertise – understanding the social objective and marketing savvy – that makes it a success. I was fortunate to have recruited a team of marketing staff to assist me in running the businesses, and a team of dedicated social workers to deliver on the social objective. In response to the growing awareness of healthy food after the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic, in 2004 I began to set up healthy-living specialty organic shops that sold organic veggies (again from the sheltered organic farm) in the railway concourse, followed by four more shops later. As of 2009, we had established a total of 20 social enterprises, providing more than 230 jobs for persons with psychiatric disabi l- ities, the disadvantaged and the able-bodied, and simultaneously creating over 450 training positions with a total turnover of over HKD 25 million that yielded a small profit. A model that others are following Responding to the success of social enterprises in Hong Kong, our mainland China counterparts made numerous study visits to Hong Kong to learn about this approach to the disadvantaged. I am glad to say that Guangzhou City also set up a farm to provide both employment and training opportunities to persons with psychiatric disabilities, and a mental hospital in Xinjiang set up a similar farm. Ever since my retirement in 2009, I have traveled widely to different provinces and cities of mainland China to deliver talks on my previous working experience, and I encourage colleagues to come to Hong Kong to see how we do things. This sort of exchange serves to show visitors that people with a history of mental illness can recover and hold down a job like anyone else. Naturally, social enterprises run by nonprofit welfare organizations are limited; they are “models” of best practice. My ultimate aim is to encourage business firms to partner with non-profit organizations to set up actual small businesses that employ persons with disabilities or to set up social enterprises within their own firms. Such an endeavor represents more than just corporate social responsibility; it is a commitment to plough back profits into a company to create employment positions for the disadvantaged. That is my vision, and I am optimistic that others will share it. I am now seeing more young entrepreneurs enter the field of social enterprise with financial support from social ventures providing seed money. Social entrepreneurship has to be nurtured, and optimally during young people’s years at university. I have seen social entrepreneurship being taken up by various business schools at Hong Kong’s universities, but the field still has a long way to go. Since the enactment of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008, the interest of governments in this area has been growing. Every effort should be made to provide jobs through social enterprises. I do hope that more young social entrepreneurs will decide to go into business
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