Wendy Xu and the Conversations with Practitioners Working Group
Su Wang is the co-founder of SEED for Social Innovation in China. Founded in 2012, SEED is a nonprofit organization that discovers, trains, and connects China’s young social innovators. In SEED’s ten-year journey, the organization has evolved into a community network of over 400 social entrepreneurs in China.
The beginning of SEED
The journey of SEED started with a reading group of students by Charles River in Boston, USA. The reading group was called North Shore, which, in Chinese, shared the spirit of the Left Bank of the River Seine in Paris (the gathering place of influential thinkers in the 1940s). SEED’s initial purpose was to study social science with a keen eye on applications to China. The students also thought about what they could do beyond scholarly work. Utilizing Boston’s access to many academic experts, the group organized a training camp, inviting professors to teach nonprofit management and how to look at social problems from various angles. The training camp was the first of SEED’s summer camps, which is their flagship program.
An example of a SEED Fellow: Coordinating aid after natural disasters
To provide insight into their program, Su shared the story of an early-year SEED fellow who has a day job as a dentist but is also involved with coordinating aid for natural disasters.
In response to the damage caused by an earthquake in Southwest China in 2008, the fellow traveled to Sichuan to help. During the flight, he started to think about what he could do after landing and began to talk with everybody else on the flight. He learned about people’s skills and abilities, such as who is a medical doctor, a therapist, etc. and he gathered information on which resources are in shortage in each area.
When he landed, he discovered that what he learned on the plane was crucial and in greater need than expected. While many resources, donations, and volunteers flew to the area, the rescue efforts were haphazard due to a poor match between skills and need.
After this experience, the fellow founded a social organization “Zhuoming Disaster Information Center” for publicizing and sharing information during major natural disasters in China. The organization’s footprint goes beyond China, with involvement in natural disaster rescues in other parts of Asia. They also play an active role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Zhuoming organized a team of volunteers when Wuhan City announced the lockdown in January 2020. Three hours into the lockdown announcement, a team of 200 professionals were selected from thousands of volunteering applicants and flew to Wuhan. The group includes social workers, doctors, nurses, and psychological counselors. Having prior experience, he anticipated the massive pressure of exhaustion of medical service and resources in Wuhan, a city with a 10 million population. Therefore, they provided constant medical services to households self-quarantined at home and organized other organizations to ship ventilators to Hubei Province, the hotspot of COVID-19. In addition, they set up a system of remote medical services adapted from the top general hospitals in China. In this way, they empowered many more medical doctors and counselors in China to help. The system built during the outbreak in Wuhan carried on throughout these two years in pandemic control and relief. The action team in Wuhan thus evolved into another organization, NCP Relief, which reacted to the pandemic outbreak in Italy and Iran in March 2020. It continued until the outbreak in Hong Kong and Shanghai in 2022. NCP Relief now has a more comprehensive management and operation system, including psychological support for infected and volunteer teams, an efficient online information system to reach those in need and update and spread relevant information, and special working teams for people with special needs such as pregnant women and elderly with chronic diseases.
Pushback against impact evaluations
As the social sector in China has expanded, social organizations have been encouraged to conduct impact evaluations of their programs. However, social organizations are often skeptical of conducting impact evaluations. Su explained,
“[Leaders of social organizations] often bring a good criticism against these statistical tests regarding these pushbacks. The goals of social programs and social services are hard to measure and quantify. The small number of very hands-on quantifiable variables means losing a lot of contextual information.”
Since the social sector is relatively young in China, few researchers have cultivated the relationships that are necessary to run successful impact evaluations. Su points outs,
“[Impact evaluation is] not just about the evaluation. You have to design the programs to figure out what’s rigorous and what has an effect. You have to spend years cultivating those relationships with nonprofits and understanding the context.”
Vision for SEED and China’s social sector
“My vision is that we could accompany the entire life cycle of someone who works in the social sector in China.” — Su Wang
The lifecycle of a social sector worker may start with a desire to learn about social problems and how these problems are addressed. Awareness of the problems may develop to a desire to volunteer at social organizations and build skills. Eventually, the social sector worker may want to start their own organization. SEED would like to help people at every step of this lifecycle. More specifically, the SEED Fellowship program has expanded into a comprehensive lifelong community support program with year-long community support and managing daily community engagement.
In addition, SEED starts an incubator for social sector startups, targeting early-stage organizations, specifically social entrepreneurs. They organize a three-month program that guides young entrepreneurs through every step of registering organizations, funding, building relationships with various stakeholders, including governments, and experimenting with “a fit of a market segment.”
Finally, SEED also has a podcast to engage a broad audience on the real hurdles practitioners face, such as what is feasible, and how to progress with an entrepreneurial spirit. It hopes to bring the young people a message of “getting hands dirty” instead of “talking loud” about social causes.
For the vision and future of the social sector of China, Su shared,
“If I wanted to pick one thing to start, if I’m to go back to China and start my own company, it would probably be about the labor market in the social sector. I think there’s something that’s deeply pathological about the sector, which is that people tend to be too dedicated to what they created and founded. You will typically find people who work as a founder in their organization for 5 or 10 years and some of the organizations are definitely stagnating, and sometimes declining. These are people who value dedication and sacrifice. So it’s hard for others to motivate them to go outside of [their organization].”
Su explained that tension often occurs when an employee at a social organization wants to exert a larger influence or wants to move to another social organization. The founder can become antagonistic when they feel the employee is not dedicated to their cause.
“I think the mobility of the labor market inside the social sector is a very big problem in China, and a lot of it is cultural.”
The interview offers a short glimpse into the 10-year journey of SEED, rapidly innovating in programs with keeping their community of SEEDers and their value at heart: SEED-Social Responsibility, Empathy, Empowerment, and Dedication (SEED). The past ten years also saw a rapidly changing China society and social sector, with many developments and much more to come.
We thank Su Wang for sharing insights and experiences from SEED projects with our Conversations with Practitioners working group. We hope this interview inspires the MD4SG community (and others as well) to understand the challenges social organizations have and develop appreciation for people devoting their time to tackle societal problems.
This interview with Su Wang was led by Wendy Xu.
Reference:
Some details of NCP Relief and its action in combating COVID-19 are from SEED’s report Anti-Pandemic Professional Action Forces in the report series Research of Anti-Pandemic Action Forces. 新冠疫情研究行动丨专业化自组织是如何高效行动的 — — 以NCP为例
