Shanghai!

Hi Everyone, Danielle is going to thrill us with some lovely stories and pictures from her internship in Shanghai!

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Hello from Shanghai! I can’t believe I’ve already completed my first two weeks at Ventures in Development (www.venturesindev.org), a nonprofit that promotes social entrepreneurship in the Greater China region. Ventures in Development’s work spans two areas, Knowledge Development (spreading awareness of the idea of a social enterprise) and Enterprise Development (identifying and incubating ideas that have the potential to become sustainable business enterprises yielding quantifiable direct social benefits in areas of need).

Right now, Ventures in Development is incubating two social enterprises: Shokay and Mei Xiang Yak Cheese. I have mostly been working on online marketing for Shokay’s products, which include kids’ and ladies’ clothing, accessories, home collection and knitting yarn all made from Tibetan yak down. One challenge is communicating our story to our distributors and customers – essentially, Shokay wants its stakeholders to understand the concept of a social enterprise and how Shokay is having a development impact.

Here’s a diagram I made showing how Shokay works:

My PennSEM mentor is Carol Chyau, one of the co-founders of Shokay and Ventures in Development. Carol met Marie So, the other co-founder, while at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to study International Development. They were united by a common belief that social enterprise presented a more viable solution for development problems than traditional top-down approaches, and they both wanted to apply these ideas in Greater China. Their original idea was a Mobile Movie Bus – inspired by the idea of a mobile library, they envisioned a bus that would travel to rural villages in China, generating advertising revenue and creating a social impact by playing educational clips. The bus would also sell consumer goods from the cities that are normally not available in rural areas. However, after doing some additional research they abandoned the idea, as they found that previous attempts at creating such a mobile movie bus had been unsuccessful and the government also had plans to fund a similar program.

While visiting the China Exploration Research Society, Carol and Marie learned of a project to apply Western-style cheese-making technique to make cheese using Tibetan yak’s milk. As they researched how to turn this project into a successful social enterprise, they discovered that yak down could also be processed into a cashmere-like textile. It was then that they realized the potential of a sustainable social business that brings gourmet yak cheese and luxury yak down products to the international market.

Yesterday evening was the grand opening of Shokay’s second retail store, located in the Sheraton Shanghai Hongqiao Hotel. It’s been really inspiring to see how much Shokay has grown since its founding in 2006. Here is a picture of the Shokay team after the ribbon-cutting, showing off our stuffed yaks and giant shrimp sushi (all hand-knit with Shokay yarn, of course):