A funding scheme launched by the Home Affairs Bureau calls upon universities, research institutions, social enterprise platforms and organizations, individual social enterprises, and other interested parties to conduct studies or projects on the social impact of the social enterprise sector in Hong Kong.

Called the “Funding Scheme on Studies on Social Impact of Social Enterprises”, it will provide a maximum of HK$200,000 for five studies or projects.

“We are delighted to note the development of our social enterprise sector on various fronts over the past years. We see the merits of supporting more sector-wide impact studies, with a view to facilitating public understanding of the contributions of the social enterprise sector to the community and the promotion of the sector for wider support and collaboration,” a spokesman for the Home Affairs Bureau said.

The deadline for application is December 20, 2013. Applicants are expected to complete their work within 18 months after the funding is granted.

In a new viral video launched this week by GoldieBox which has tallied over 6 million views to date, the girls demonstrate their inventive power by building a Rube Goldberg machine.

“Sabrina, Raven, Reese, and Brett built an incredible machine, far beyond our highest expectations. We think it’s a perfect encapsulation of the potential of every little girl, with a nice splash of the organized chaos that is the trademark of any good invention. We want everyone to see it and be inspired.”

GoldieBox is a toy company founded by Debbie Sterling, a Stanford engineer set out to “disrupt the pink aisle” and introduce the joy of engineering to young girls. Their toys revolve around the character Goldie (not related to Barbie), an engineer herself who works on construction projects to help others.

A huge challenge, as you may remember Sterling explaining at SOCAP last year when she launched the company, is that 90 percent of engineers in society are male, which means the female perspective in engineering barely exists – a problem for society considering that half the population is female.

The song in the video, an alteration of the Beastie Boys’ “Girls” with lyrics rewritten, is rapped by an 8-year-old girl. Although the video currently has millions of views, it could be taken to new heights. The company is currently one of four finalists competing in the Intuit’s “Small Business, Big Game” contest. The winner will have their ad displayed during the Super Bowl on February 2.

Construction for the Tower, which has been renamed the Jockey Club Innovation Tower following a HK$249 million donation by the Hong Kong Jockey Club that was also used to set up the Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation (JCDISI) housed at the Tower, began in 2009.

The fifteen-storey structure provides a 15,000 square metres of floor area, accommodating up to 1,800 staff and students per day. It was designed by Zaha Hadid, the first female to be awarded with the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004.

Inside the Tower are public-oriented spaces including a design museum and exhibition hall. Lecture theatres, classrooms, studios, workshops, and labs occupy much of the other space.

The Tower is being touted as the new driving force in the development of Hong Kong as a design hub in Asia, and also as the space to facilitate inter-disciplinary research and education in the field of design, not only as a driver for the Hong Kong economy but for its potential to contribute to better quality of life and sustainable development in society.

Already the JCDISI hosted a Social Innovation Festival as the university positions itself in the community to promote positive social change.

Photos from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design.

SunFunder, a crowdfunding platform helping social enterprises secure loans for solar projects in off-grid communities, has announced a second loan being 100% repaid this month.

The campaign was launched a year ago by SunnyMoney, a social enterprise owned by UK-based charity SolarAid that sells solar lights in Malawi, Zambia, Kenya, and Tanzania. It sought a $10,000 loan to purchase and sell close to 800 solar-powered lights in Eastern Zambia.

The impact: over 3,900 people have switched from dangerous kerosene lanterns to solar alternatives, saving over $90,000 in energy costs per year and increasing disposable income by 12 percent, allowing families to spend on other necessities such as food, health, and education.

This milestone achieved by SunFunder and SunnyMoney, along with another fully repaid project announced in May, is a testament to the bankability of solar projects in off-grid communities and is important to get big institutions behind these projects. As SunFunder explains:

“Getting big international finance institutions (IFI’s) like the World Bank behind off-grid solar sector is ultimately a winning scenario, because as the International Energy Agency has stated, we need nearly $1 trillion in cumulative investment to achieve universal energy access by 2030. The more we can use crowdfunding and community-backed approaches to prove that the off-grid solar sector is well worth the investment for big IFI’s, the better off the 1.3 billion unelectrified population will be in the coming years.”

SunFunder presents a strong case. Despite small and early successes (SunFunder launched in 2012), it has helped raise over $200,000 across 13 projects with a 100% repayment rate to date.

This video below demonstrates how SunFunder works.

These green bonds, which they call impact investments, fund projects from around the world that reduce the effects of climate change and assist communities to adapt to its consequences.

“Responsible investment at Zurich is about ‘doing well and doing good’,” said Cecilia Reyes, Chief Investment Officer. “Zurich recognizes that creating value for all its key stakeholders is crucial to long-term success. Green bonds are a good fit with Zurich’s overall investment strategy as well as its impact investing aspirations, targeted to support sustainable development and resilient communities. It is an opportunity to invest both with impact and at a return fully compensating for the risk.”

Bloomberg reported in August that sales of green bonds are heading towards a record year as governments from the US to China promote the global expansion of clean energy to tackle climate change, and as the bonds offer investors an alternative to volatile equities.

Investment into green bonds, according to Zurich, makes good business sense because the global insurer has a rapidly growing footprint in many emerging markets and is thus directly exposed to the challenges related to potential effects of climate change and the intensive use of scarce natural resources. Zurich says it is building a “portfolio of impact investments” to address these issues.

BlackRock, a US investment management giant, has been chosen to select, buy, and sell green bonds for the portfolio, in accordance with guidelines, clearly defined by Zurich.

Their involvement may come as no surprise. Before this announcement, BlackRock had already acquired the domain ImpactInvesting.com which is being mysteriously redirected to their homepage.

Responding to this initiative, vice chairman of BlackRock Ken Wilson said, “We are proud to team up with Zurich as the company commits to the green bond market segment at this important stage of the market’s development.”

“By encouraging transparency, liquidity, rigorous inclusion credentials, and impact reporting, we can together contribute to the creation of a robust and credible market, which will have a greater impact than any singular investment in green bonds. BlackRock’s commitment to impact investing spans asset classes and enables our clients to access investment strategies that target a reasonable risk-adjusted rate of return in addition to positive and measureable social or environmental outcomes.”

Photo from Zurich.

Announced today, Meticulon is a new social enterprise started up in Calgary to offer high-tech services provided by people with autism, leveraging their meticulous technical and computer skills. It was created in July and fashioned after successful ventures in Europe.

Meticulon is a project of Autism Calgary Association in partnership with the federal government and the Sinneave Family Foundation, a recognized partner across North America in programming and research that improves the quality of life for those living with autism.

The company taps into the extraordinary talents of adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder to provide superior technical services – software testing, quality assurance, digitization, scanning, and data verification – to client companies, and seeks to directly employ 44 people and place over 100 others elsewhere within 4 years.

Meticulon aspires to start at least 2 branch locations in Canada and help stimulate the creation of 250 more jobs in other industries for people with autism. It is founding a free community-based resource website for information exchange, cooperative learning, and mentoring.

Over 85 percent of adults with autism are unemployed, yet many of them are vastly superior to neurotypical adults in certain areas such as excelling at detailed computer tasks, detecting errors, and performing mathematical functions.

There are over 400,000 adults in Canada with autism, including those with valuable technical skills and talents, yet many of them have long been overlooked and under-served in the job market. Many are often written off.

Using intensive assessment methods developed in Belgium, Meticulon identifies its employees’ (Meticulon consultants’) key strengths and areas needing improvement, and provides customized job coaching, helping them to overcome workplace challenges.

“We don’t impart skills or abilities to our people – they have that in abundance. All we have to do is match them to the right job and help them to unlock their inborn gifts and talents,” said Johnson in a news release.

“We’re here to help people, but it also has to make sense to our customers,” he added. “Although many customers come to us with the motive of doing some social good, they will retain our services because of the excellent work product we provide.”

For the last 25 years, Echoing Green has provided seed money and support to social entrepreneurs around the globe. Their fellowship remains a popular opportunity to kick-start social change ideas: over 3,000 applicants are expected to vie for a chance at 35 to 40 fellowship spots, according to the nonprofit.

In preparation for this year’s applications process which begins on December 3rd, Echoing Green launched a promotional video as an inspiration for potential applicants to identify a societal problem and dedicate themselves to fixing it.

From the Echoing Green website:

We believe investing in and supporting the right people relative to the right ideas and ability to execute, rather than specific business plans, results in a lifetime of leadership. Echoing Green has invested over $33 million in seed-stage funding and strategic assistance in nearly 600 world-class leaders driving positive social change around the globe. Echoing Green Fellows include the founders of Teach For America, City Year, College Summit, Citizen Schools, One Acre Fund, and SKS Microfinance.

Selected fellows will receive up to $90,000 over the first two years of the fellowship as well as ongoing support.

Dressed uniformly in bright green t-shirts, they walked into the Den hoping to secure a $10,000 loan to build a greenhouse that would allow them to cultivate herbs and vegetables year-round and boost production for their salad dressing business.

Their social enterprise, Hope Blooms, is led by Jessie Jollymore, a dietician from a community health centre in Halifax who wanted to address food security issues. Jollymore saw an opportunity to turn an abandoned site into a community garden for people to access healthy, organic food.

At Hope Blooms, youth learn to grow food, produce and market salad dressing, and run a business. Over 40 at-risk youth look after 27 plots in the community garden.

Hope Blooms salad dressings became so popular that they were selling out at local markets across communities in Halifax.

“We just cannot keep up with the demand. We turned down offers from local restaurants and stores,” said Mamadou Wade, one of the young entrepreneurs pitching to the Dragons.

Their sales to date, to the surprise of the Dragons, totaled over $26,000.

Each Hope Blooms dressing sells for $8. Profits from the business are either allocated to a scholarship fund for the young entrepreneurs, donated to different community charities of the youths’ choice, or reinvested into Hope Blooms in order to sustain the garden project, teaching others in the community how to grow food.

“We love growing a business because you don’t have to be a certain age or colour, and it doesn’t matter where you come from,” said Tiffany Calvin, another Hope Blooms entrepreneur.

After hearing the pitch, the teary-eyed Dragons made them an offer. Four of them – Arlene Dickinson, Bruce Coxon, David Chilton, and Jim Treliving – each gave $10,000. The Dragons passed on the initial deal that included a 5 percent royalty on the investment, deciding they wanted their money reinvested into the business.

But one Dragon – Kevin O’Leary – didn’t want any part in the investment.

“In the end, the great thing about being an entrepreneur is you make money for yourself but you can also give some back. That’s the key, you need both. For a business to be successful it has to be profitable – that’s the DNA of a business,” said O’Leary. “I have to make money as an investor, and you didn’t offer me that, so with a heavy heart I say I’m out.”

“But guys, not all investment returns are measured in money coming back to the investor. It can be impact in the community, all kinds of things. I have no issue with that,” said Chilton, offering a different perspective.

Putting the cherry on top of $40,000 in funding, Treliving, the chairman and founder of Boston Pizza restaurants, proposed to distribute Hope Blooms products in his company, and is currently working on getting the products inside Boston Pizza locations around Christmas.

Or, you’re thousands of miles away from the conference because as an early-stage company, you simply cannot afford to fork out thousands of dollars to attend boring panel discussions with no opportunity to pitch your idea.

An alternative: Turkish Airlines, in effort to promote its country’s tech industry, is starting an Invest on Board program in partnership with Turkish startup accelerator Etohum to bring hand-picked pitch videos from startups to its business class passengers through in-seat televisions.

The initiative was revealed last week. Turkish Airlines has not officially announced the platform yet, but Invest on Board project manager Feray Uysal told travel news site Skift that they “will launch it soon, but the date is not certain now.”

Already, pitch videos from 11 startups (mostly in Turkish with English subtitles) are on the website, where entrepreneurs can apply to participate in the program. The ideas range from online dating to time banking services, suggesting an opportunity for social enterprises working in the tech space to participate. So far, the videos focus on the ideas themselves, without answering what the entrepreneurs need or how an investor might actually make an investment to the startups through this program.

Invest on Board is being marketed as a service to help busy investors find great startups all across the globe without the distractions of phone calls and meetings:

Or if the potential investor happens to be Kobe Bryant and Lionel Messi, without the distractions of championships and World Cups.

Photo from Turkish Airlines.

But in cases of emergency where communities are left with nothing and immediate relief is needed, a charity approach that doesn’t depend on the beneficiaries’ ability to acquire for their survival would theoretically be more effective at saving lives.

An emergency struck the Philippines on November 7 when for a several hours, the 600km-wide Typhoon Haiyan carrying winds of up to 315 km/h blanketed the country – it could not be seen from satellite images. In comparison, Typhoon Haiyan was large enough to cover the whole Atlantic coast from the Canadian border all the way down to Florida. Reports out of the Philippines show that the strongest hit area is in the city of Tacloban, home to more than 200,000 people and now 90 percent destroyed.

Help is trickling in as major aid groups and charities like the Philippine Red Cross and Oxfam are accepting donations. Even so, skepticism about the trustworthiness of charity organizations and their ability to provide effective relief solutions is evident, prompting Charity Navigator to release a tip sheet about making donations alongside a list of established charities.

From the area of social entrepreneurship, Gawad Kalinga, a Philippine-based poverty-alleviating organization whose founder is an awardee of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, has set up relief operations. The organization and its volunteers have been distributing three types of “relief packs”: Family Packs containing rice, milk, kids’ vitamins, canned food, and blankets; Rehab Packs containing galvanized corrugated metal roofing and wire, nails, a hammer, and saw; and Kitchen Packs containing a casserole dish, frying pan, utensils, plastic pitcher, and cups. They have just begun accepting donations as well.

Meanwhile, Give2Asia, a US-based catalyst for impact investment in Asia, is collecting funds online for Typhoon Haiyan victims. According to its website, Give2Asia is working with its field team to coordinate short-term relief efforts and identify needs for long-term recovery.

Previously, it was estimated that as many as 10,000 people have died as a result of Typhoon Haiyan. So far, 1,774 people are confirmed dead with over 2,487 people hurt.

Do you know an organization from the social enterprise sector helping with Typhoon Haiyan relief efforts? Share with us in the comments below.