Vicky!

First entry from Vicky Lam!

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Greetings from Hong Kong! Actually, I am already halfway through my summer internship with Ventures in Development , but there are so many interesting projects going on with ViD that I don’t have much time to spare and share my exhilarating experience in the past month. Apologies for the delay!

As you have probably learnt from Danielle, another PennSEM intern, ViD is a non-profit that aims at cultivating the concept of social entrepreneurship in the Greater China region through knowledge and enterprise development. My major task this summer is to work on “Knowledge Development” through coordinating a number of activities held in Hong Kong, which you will find out more about in my upcoming journals.

Even though I am spending most of my internship in Hong Kong, I worked at the Shanghai office for my first week to understand the basic operations of ViD and Shokay, one of the social enterprises that ViD is incubating. The tagline of Shokay is “Luxury with a story, style with a touch of humanity,” which eloquently summarizes the developmental nature of our brand. At Shokay, we retail a variety of hand-knitted products created from the precious yak down that we directly source from the Tibetan herders in the Himalayan region.

Blankets, hats, scarves, sushi platter… everything at Shokay is made from the finest Tibetan yak yarn!

On the second-last day of my short trip to Shanghai, I joined a few colleagues, left the metropolitan Shanghai, took a two-hour ferry and arrived at rural Chongming Island, where our knitters reside. Can you believe that ALL the Shokay knitted products are hand-made by just 40 women from this island? Amazed at their knitting skills, I chatted with some of them and learnt more about their life stories. Most of them have only received primary education and farm on their own fields. While some of them might have worked in factories before, due to the unfavorable geographic location of Chongming Island, many factories closed down and local job opportunities become extremely limited. Our knitting cooperative therefore allows them to turn their genuine interests in knitting into a vocation that provides a stable source of income to their families. Below are some pictures that I took during my one-day trip:

Two of our amazing knitters finishing the knitted baby yaks!

With my PennSEM mentor Carol Chyau (right) who co-founded ViD and Shokay. She is also a Penn alum!

Sunset at rural Chongming Island, where our most talented knitters are from

Now that I’m back in Hong Kong, one of the tasks that I’m responsible for is coordinating Shokay’s “Knit a Yak Campaign.” Launched in late April, we worked with 7 elderly service centers in the Wong Tai Sin district and recruited some elderly volunteer knitters to knit 2009 items using the Shokay DIY Knitting Kits. This area has the highest population of singleton elderly in Hong Kong. Most of them seldom interact with the local community, and may receive little care and support from family members. The 2009 knitted items will be given to the singleton elderly on Senior Citizen’s Day (15 Nov 2009). Through knitting and giving, we hope to encourage the volunteer knitters to contribute to their community and outreach to the singleton elderly, Eventually, we hope to sustain the program by setting up a fund from the profits generated from the sale of the DIY Knitting Kits. You are most welcomed to check out the details of this program on our website, especially if you are in Hong Kong!

Some of our elderly volunteer knitters in the Hong Kong “Knit a Yak Campaign”

-Vicky