HKSAR Chief Executive Mrs. Carrie Lam gave recognition to the Nurturing Social Minds programme today in a speech at the Philanthropy for Better Cities Forum, convened by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust. In her own words:

“…It’s why we created the Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Fund (SIE Fund) five years ago. The Fund was designed to support social entrepreneurs, those focused on developing innovative and successful products and services for society’s needs. Over the past three years, the SIE Fund has put more than HK$120 million into 140 projects, and I am pleased to say that it’s finding success.

Consider, for example, the Yeh Family Philanthropy (YFP) fund. The YFP, working with the SIE Fund, runs an educational programme on social entrepreneurship and venture philanthropy at two Hong Kong universities, and has added a third local university this academic year. To date, the universities have made available nine credit-bearing courses, inspiring more than 200 students. They work with social ventures to tackle real-life social and business problems and, in doing so, benefit our underprivileged and the needy.”

Mrs. Lam has been a long-time supporter of the programme, giving the keynote speech at our launch event over 3 years ago. We are honored to receive such public praise from her, just as we are honored to work alongside the SIE Fund to nurture Hong Kong’s promising social minds. We shall continue our efforts anew!

Mrs. Lam’s full speech can be viewed here.

The Yeh Family Philanthropy (“YFP”) is delighted to announce that we will continue to be an Intermediary of the Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Fund (“SIE Fund”) for 2 more years until 2020! We’ve had a prolific partnership over the last 3.5 years, and couldn’t be more pleased at the results. We shall focus our efforts anew at building the social innovation ecosystem for the betterment of Hong Kong and the world.

This means our Nurturing Social Minds programme will continue to deliver its highly touted experiential-learning social entrepreneurship & social finance courses at HKUST and CUHK. Our new Fall 2018 courses already started last week! (check our Programme page for more details).

At the same time, Nurturing Social Minds (NSM) is thrilled to welcome our 3rd university partner into the family, The Hong Kong Baptist University (“HKBU”) Business School!

Under the new partnership, HKBU Business School will develop and deliver a new programme on social entrepreneurship for its students. The programme will use a two-pronged approach to teach HKBU students how to start a social venture and to provide marketing knowledge and support to social enterprises. On top of the lectures, students will be learning from pioneers and practitioners from the field of social innovation, both in Hong Kong and internationally

The programme will consist of 3 parts:

1. An introductory course called Social Venture Planning, where students develop their own social business plan proposals
2. Our familiar impact-grant NSM course, where students will work in teams as marketing consultants for curated social enterprises (Social Venture Partners) that have already proven their concept, to help scale up operations with evolving marketing strategies. The student teams will then be pitching on behalf of their Social Venture Partner for HK$250,000 in grant funding from The Yeh Family Philanthropy
3. A marketing practicum, in which students will complete a 120-hour internship with their Social Venture Partner

The NSM course welcomes undergraduate students from HKBU Business School’s Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing, as well as postgraduate programs to join beginning in Spring 2019.

Stay tuned for more exciting news to come!