What Social Innovations Advisory has been doing to promote a resilient civil society and inclusive development

 It's been nearly 16 months since I last wrote about our work at Social Innovations Advisory (SIA), the consulting firm I started back in early 2018. Since then, we've been through struggling through a pandemic that is going into its third year, and an abrupt departure from China last summer with my family (one day I may write about this). In January this year, we ended up back on our feet here in Taipei, Taiwan where we'll be based for the next few years and maybe beyond.

The mission of SIA is to build a resilient civil society for inclusive, sustainable development. Early on, SIA's focus was on China, but as I explained in my last post, we began to venture further afield following China's growing footprint overseas. In 2019, we organized a team of researchers to carry out a UNDP/DFID project to examine the social risks of Chinese overseas investment in Nepal and Zambia as part of that massive development project known as the Belt and Road Initiative.

This project led to consulting for the UK government's China Infrastructure Programme which was intended to help Chinese state-owned enterprises raise the social and environmental standards of their infrastructure projects overseas. We were brought in because of our expertise on China and inclusive development, particularly social inclusion and community engagement. We succeeded in bringing in Chinese partners, including a large industry groups whose members are SOEs, to work on projects to improve their engagement with affected communities.

Since March 2021, in collaboration with the Innovation for Change network and other NGOs, we've been working directly with those communities and CSOs in the global South to strengthen their capacity to understand the BRI, and engage Chinese government and corporate actors to hold them accountable. It's the opposite of what we did for the China Infrastructure Programme and arguably more impactful because civil society is more open to working with us, and understands our language more than Chinese SOEs which have been conservative and cautious in embracing the idea of inclusive development.

In addition to the work we've been doing with global South civil society and BRI, there are two other important areas of work SIA has been involved in. 

One is helping organizations re-think, re-orient and re-strategize their work in challenging spaces such as China and Hong Kong. We have advised the EU, international NGOs, and other organizations develop new strategies through research and convening of stakeholders.

The other is helping NGOs, particularly those working on human rights which have relied heavily on international funding, explore and develop innovating strategies and methods to diverse their local funding base to become more financially sustainable. We have designed tools to train and mentor NGOs through this process, and hope to do more in helping them develop prototypes that can be scaled up.

If you'd like more information about our work or want to talk about collaborating, please take a look at this pamphlet about our work, and get in touch with me at sshieh@siadvisory.org.

Pathways to Financial Sustainability for NGOs

Social Innovations Advisory (SIA) is pleased to announce the release of its report, Building the Roadmap for Financial Sustainability for Rights-based CSOs in the Global South. The report analyses case studies of CSOs in the Asia-Pacific region that are piloting a wide range of business and funding models. These cases are based on interviews conducted during the spring of 2019 with 22 CSO leaders about their experiences, achievements and challenges. Summaries of 16 of these cases in standardized templates are now available in the CSO Sustainability Database on the website of Innovation for Change (I4C). The report can also be found on the website of Rights CoLab, of which SIA's director, Shawn Shieh, is a Contributor.

 

The findings of this research project have also been shared in the following platforms:

 

·      A podcast in the Civic Innovator’s series featuring SIA’s founder, Shawn Shieh, Innpactia’s coordinator, Ana María Espin and Innpactia’s founder, Juan Carlos Lozano on “Creative Sustainability” focusing on the imaginative and inventive ways that civil society organizations are seeking resources, funding and other support for their work in often difficult circumstances.

 

·      Shawn Shieh’s OpenGlobalRights article on how Chinese CSOs are at the forefront of exploring hybrid business and funding models thanks to China having perhaps the most diverse funding ecosystem in Asia.

 

·      SIA’s report and cases join a growing body of work carried out by the Innovation for Change network and Rights CoLab on financial sustainability and alternative CSO business and funding models in other regions of the world. SIA’s report can be found on the website of Rights CoLab, and the cases can be found on Rights CoLab’s Mapping Civil Society Innovation platform.

 

SIA plans to use these findings to highlight the critical importance of financial sustainability and local funding to both funders and CSOs in the coming years. We will be developing toolkits and providing trainings and coaching to mentor CSOs on exploring alternative business and funding models.

 

For questions, please contact Shawn Shieh, Founder and Director, SIA, at shawnshieh@gmail.com.