Innovate . Invest . Incubate
Foundation for Shared Impact
About Us:
Foundation for Shared Impact (FSI) is built on the philosophy of “shared impact”, which believes that when different groups come together to share knowledge, resources and time, collectively we can achieve a greater social impact than by working separately. From our experience, the social impact space in Hong Kong tends to be siloed, with organizations considering each other as “competitors”, unwilling to share what they do or to collaborate. We believe that no one organization, no matter how innovative, can solve systemic problems alone. This drives our approach as follows:
We Educate, Empower and Unite: We help the people who help people. We are educators, founders, students, business leaders, and community members who believe in solving today’s biggest challenges with a scalable solution.
We Build Capacity: As a tech-savvy team who believes in using data and technology to enact change, we help our partner companies and other social impact organizations streamline their operations via technological tools and automated solutions, so that they can redirect their resources to capacity building.
We Drive Systems Change: Beyond offering programs in response to the community’s needs, we build a model that leaders can adopt to promote broader cross-sector collaboration, innovation, and positive social change.
SE Information:
Product and Service
FSI programs bring disparate communities together to solve big problems. Using the mantra “educate, empower, and unite,” we teach people how to improve their ideas and organizations, empower them with the tools needed to do so, and unite communities to help make scalable change possible.
Impact Lab
Impact Lab is an experiential learning course that gives university students an opportunity to work directly for social ventures under the guidance of experienced educators, entrepreneurs, and professional mentors. Over the last 10 years, we have developed and delivered a one-of-a-kind impact-based learning curriculum that teaches HK youth how to put the shared impact philosophy into practice which the University of Hong Kong is currently offering to its students as a credit-bearing course.
Through the Impact Lab, we have nurtured 900+ students who have contributed over 119,280 hours of work in HK social businesses and NGOs. These students have taken the shared impact philosophy and applied it to their careers and community service, with former students starting their own social impact organizations, joining NGO boards, and leading fundraising and COVID-related initiatives.
Community Business Support
Through our Community Business Support, we work with HK entrepreneurs, particularly disadvantaged ethnic minorities, to build successful businesses. We have helped more than 40 businesses, including 13 portfolio startups, working with founders and team members on building their capacity and scope, not just as businesses, but as community leaders. Our goal is to help the disadvantaged populations of Hong Kong to lift themselves out of multigenerational poverty, which we believe can be best achieved through entrepreneurship. See our previous success story from Legend Sports Academy.
Community Connections
Through Community Connections, we connect professionals from the private sector who want to use their skills and experience in a socially impactful way with HK NGOs who need their assistance. FSI hosts Connection Sessions between the private sector and social impact space, facilitating the broad sharing of resources, knowledge, and information and encouraging skills-based, highly engaged partnerships.
Shared Data
Shared Data is FSI’s initiative to make HK’s social impact sector more transparent and efficient with data. As of 30 Jan 2022, there are 9,621 registered charities (and 16,291 including subsidiaries and sub-subsidiaries) in Hong Kong alone. However, the entire social impact sector remains quite closed off and disparate - with very limited information available about who is doing what, what impact is being created, which organizations can collaborate for a bigger impact, etc. Through crowdsourcing research and scraping and consolidating public data, the Shared Data initiative aims to build Hong Kong’s first public, comprehensive and unbiased database of all Hong Kong-registeredcharities.
Peak Impact - Coworking Space
We also operate a small coworking center where organizations are able to share space and diffuse the expense of rent. It’s also a great environment where innovators bounce ideas off each other, and offer moral support.
