Social Impact Growth through Impact Venture Capital in Hong Kong

There is a missing piece of the puzzle in the impact ecosystem, how can we grow and scale impact ventures beyond their initial seed and ideation stage? There are many incubation programs and startup bootcamps, but without sustainable capital and strategic investments, many of the social innovation ideas fail in the long run or remain at a small scale. In this panel, we will explore what are the potential growth trajectories of social startups, what kind of capital is necessary, what investors are expecting and their appetite for risk, financial and impact return on investment.
A recent research paper done by Dream Impact and GlobeScan will shed light on how to bridge social startups and potential impact venture capitalists and enable collaborations by closing the investment gap.
 

Speakers

Moderator

If the city that we all live in serves a great deal of memory, it shall be a compose of art, culture and all sensations of humans and environment. Against the industrial stereotype of technological removal of human touch, it takes artisan senses and designer hearts to cook the culture and memory with right technology that makes humanity matter. These values and vehicles of cultures especially hold a crucial role in defining our memories and histories in the time of challenges and pandemic. It tells a story of a generation of Asian.

The following panel in “Art, Culture and City As a Memory” gathers designers, creative directors, and architects to share their perspectives of values of arts and culture in their cities. How do we strike a set of principles to preserve culture and memory of a city, and how shall we balance the values of technological impact and the roles of humanity?
 

Speakers

Moderator

Pandemic shock, movements, global shift and disparity of economic landscape and inefficiency of digital transformation in all layers of society, are the multiple leading factors driving 2020 one of the most challenging years ever. According to a latest report by the International Labor Organisation(ILO), Covid-19 has caused the global labor working hours to fall 14 per cent during the second quarter of 2020, equivalent to the loss of 400 million full-time jobs. When much of our structural inequalities and city fragility are revealed at the time of the pandemic, how do we envision our future workforce to be part of the solution and what exactly does it take to build a workforce that is both agile and resilient to more uncertainties and complicated challenges?

The following panel gathers a group of young leaders of different sectors in Hong Kong, and together we explore what is pressingly needed to be fixed in the system, how they see the shifting meaning of workforce in the future and most importantly, how the new generation of Hong Kong leaders, the 80s and 90s, can take a more proactive role to nurture such agile and resilient workforce in and for the future.
 

Speakers

The post-pandemic world implies a deeper connectivity between human and nature than ever. Resilience of human society and natural environment at sustainability has become the fundamental core benchmarking for business, investing, policy design and education. The larger movement begins with the new normality of urban planning and the way we consume and conserve our natural resources, meaning energy, materials and space. The following panel of Sustainability, Environment and Humans looks into a larger imagination of cities and environment where the pandemic has taught us, especially in the case of energy planning in the rapidly urbanised cities. What shall be the new or reinforced principles of sustainability and resilience measurement in business, policy and governance?
 

Moderator

The weight of collective memories to Hong Kong

A city’s past forms a solid foundation of identity and solidarity of the people, something just as important as innovations and development. Under the current immensely divided society with relationships torn-apart, how, in the lens of heritage and cultural preservation, can we transform collective memory and culture embodied in heritage sites to connect different generations of Hong Kong people emotionally? What does it take to build a solid foundation for the city’s identity and resilience supporting future sustainable development?

This session will see interesting interactions between a historian and leaders in conservation management, together they delve deep into exploring collective memory as a healing means to the city, a conversation that comes much needed than ever.
 

Since the outbreak of Covid-19, all walks of leaders in the cities have strived to create initiatives or take professional emergency measures to respond to Covid-19. In response to the public health in the urban cities, it comes to the crucial engagement and preventive measures before the scenario goes further out of control.
For entrepreneurs, how have they taken their enterprises beyond the pandemic since then? How could they use their resources to support other meaningful causes which are in need of attention in society? Young entrepreneurs can put their heads together in this session to discuss creative solutions to sustain their current operations, and create more value throughout and beyond the Covid-19 response period.
Meanwhile, for medical professionals and policy planners, how would they respond collectively and in alignment with the private sector to ensure stability in the city and long-term sufficiency and consistency of public health planning, policy design and governance with digital technologies?
The following panel aims to explore deeper the lesson learnt in Covid-19 and draw some new knowledge that long-term potential planning and response to the new normal and development of their own cities. The panel would be especially a centre of the Summit to crystallize public health emergency and preventive planning for reference of other emerging cities that are prone to other waves of pandemic in future.
 

Speakers

Grassroot communities of resilience and evolutionary purposes

Many business and government-driven initiatives are striving to create innovation in society by changing systems, structures, or processes. Nonetheless, grassroots communities start with people because they believe that the future should be resilient and inclusive for all; thus, we have to create it together. Still, it’s rare to do something truly together as a collective of equal peers. Can entrepreneurial communities support both individual and collective evolution? What does it take to share the risk of building a business, or working together to achieve a meaningful goal for society? How can we design next-generation networks that are resilient and future proof? These are just some of the million-dollar questions we’re going to discuss with our guests.
 

The panel looks into a bigger prolonged global environmental crisis that links to every single of us, now and ever, water. More than 2,500,000,000 people lack access to adequate sanitation, and twice as many people in the world lack access to adequate sanitation and access to safe drinking water. From the upstream of water and oceans conservation to downstream of circular utility planning of drinking water, we seem to have been running out of time to ensure an effective movement to reverse the global water damage.

The second panel of Sustainability, Environment and Humans continues with the first panel on environmental conservation, and looks deeper into the innovations and policy concerns in the conservation of oceans and water. Riding on the latest narrative of post-pandemic recovery, how has a lockdown of the global market gotten us and the Earth a short moment of breath and rethink, what a new normal can do us and the Earth water better for next generations? What are the policy and technology innovation implications upon our natural observations and the figures behind?
 

- Visiting the homeless
- Understanding grassroot living style
- Visiting subdivided Flat and experiencing the living condition of the underprivileged
- Viewing the Sham Shui Po cityscape from the bird eye’s view
- Understanding the existing housing solutions
- Engage in a dialogue with a local NGO serving the homeless & grassroots
 

Sham Shui Po is one of the districts in Hong Kong facing complex social issues. On the other hand, it's unique cityscape creates fascinating experience for visitors.
 

Kaifong Tour is a social enterprise dedicated to promoting community engagement in Hong Kong. We provide alternative and experiential learning experience catered for schools, corporates and non-governmental organizations. With guided tours, community docent training, community exploration workshops and other community projects, we wish to bring forth a first-person perspective of a Kaifong to community lovers, educators and people from all walks of life, so that they will start to explore and appreciate the local communities, open up imaginations and reflect on various social issues.

Dream Impact is a social minded community located in Hong Kong where we aim to provide the right resources to socially-minded entrepreneurs. In the meantime, we help to bridge communities and opportunities across sectors to widen our community's circle of influence and both scale and deepen social impact through supporting the growth of a spectrum of social startups, businesses and innovations.