Healthcare

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