AVPN’s chair and vice-chair shared centre stage in a special guest speaker lecture for China’s foundation leaders in Beijing in February. The 8-day course was organised by China Foundation Centre‘s training academy and held at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.
The topic of the lecture was on social investing, which was a new concept for the audience, but was a much talked about buzz word since last year. Hence, anticipation for the event was very high and more than 80 people registered for it.Doug Miller shared with the audience on the concept of venture philanthropy and the work that AVPN is doing to help build the eco-system in Asia. Andrew Muirhead then used his previous organisation, Inspiring Scotland, as an example to illustrate how venture philanthropy works.Since social investing is still in its early stages in China, there was a lot of confusion with terminology, definitions and concepts. Questions after the presentations ranged from the clarification between venture philanthropy and impact investing, how to successfully perform an exit in social investments, and on the different models of financing. Many also queried about how to develop organisations in a sustainable way. The lecture left many with a lot of questions, which was expected for a new market that was eager to learn and to leapfrog others to achieve even more within their country. AVPN views China as a key market for development and will continue to focus in this region.
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