And it’s a wrap!
Precisely three months ago today, FSI’s Community Business Support team launched our inaugural Mentorship Program for Ethnically Diverse Entrepreneurs. Our rationale was straightforward: having worked with ethnically diverse entrepreneurs to help them grow their businesses, we firmly believe that entrepreneurship is a solution to lift underserved individuals out of intergenerational poverty.
In Hong Kong, about one in five non-Chinese-speaking individuals currently live under the poverty line, and a staggering 80% of South Asians are working-poor.
While there are inspirational ethnically diverse entrepreneurs doing great things to create positive social and environmental impact in the city, such as Clearbot, Hollo, and Resolve, the Hong Kong entrepreneurial space currently lacks diversity, inclusion, and representation of people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
That is another reason that we launched the Mentorship Program: we wanted to build a robust and compassionate community of ethnically diverse entrepreneurs in Hong Kong.
Since September this year, we have collaborated with dozens of subject matter experts to conduct workshops to equip 10 seasoned leaders with the skills and knowledge to become effective mentors, as well as to help 16 entrepreneurs from 10 growing initiatives build personal and organizational capacity, so that they can reach their full potential and accelerate their business development to reach more beneficiaries with their social missions.
A Program for New Skills, Introspection, and Solidarity
From the feedback shared by the mentees and mentors during the last session, held on 13 December, we have reason to believe that our first iteration of the Mentorship Program has been a success.
Said Turzo Bose, CEO and Co-founder of Seekr: “This is a very structured program that constantly pushed us to rethink. Joining this program has helped us to be introspective and to develop products. FSI is connecting us with a lot of people, allowing us to create the change that we have always wanted.”
For our mentees and mentors, the program has been a great experiential learning journey. “Before joining this program, I knew what I wanted to do, I just didn’t know how to do it. This program enables me to see how to grow my business,” said Shilpa Pednekar, Founder of Shilpa’s Masala Mill. “And Vivian (Program Manager at FSI) has been consistently supportive right from the start. Right now, I’m looking for vendors abroad, in Manila and Singapore. In fact, I’m going to Singapore next week to meet a potential vendor!”
Shilpa’s feedback on the learning experience provided by the program was echoed by Bharat Nangia, Founder of Aspire and mentor to Shilpa: “I’m not just a mentor here but I’ve also been mentored, especially during the two mentorship workshops on how to be a good mentor. This is a very diverse community and the program has been an eye-opener. People should bring in more mentees who can benefit from this program.”
As the mentor to Aiman Nadeem and Mahmood Khalil at Project Ethnic Minority Empowerment (PEME), Christine Vicera, herself the Founder and Co-director of be/longing, offered her experience in agreement. “We as mentors have a lot to learn as well. I feel like a mentee in the process, I’ve learned a lot from both of my mentees, such as learning to embrace the process and the challenges we face along the entrepreneurial journey. I have learned that there is no such thing as wasted time, and I’m learning to trust myself and my teammates, to remind myself of the why and the purposes of what I do.”
A Community of Shared Resources and Knowledge
In addition to the online resources and templates that FSI continues to curate and share broadly, entrepreneurs of our Mentorship Program also found the mentors and ICF Hong Kong Charter Chapter coaches we matched them with to be instrumental.
“We are very thankful to Henry, our mentor. He is always patient,” said Aaron QUE, Co-founder and Business Director of The Blomstre. “Our greatest achievement so far is aligning our business objectives. We have been mostly doing pop-ups only, but Henry advised us to think big.”
“From the mentoring sessions with Dr. Data Ng and the more than 10 coaching sessions with Arunanjali Maria, we learned that a company is only as good as its team,” said Lamia Sreya Rahman, Co-founder of Seekr, which was recently approached by Alibaba. “That got us to think about how we can be a social startup that motivates people to work in such a startup.”
At FSI, we don’t just facilitate and promote the broad sharing of resources, but we also allocate resources to those who need them the most. When Gerard Escaler, our collaborator who conducted the Marketing 101 and Demystifying ESG workshops, said to us that he would like to donate his stipends to entrepreneurs who could benefit from the fund, we decided to give it to Sisnu Sisters, so that they can actualize their business idea of publishing multilingual children’s books to help Nepalese children explore their identity and culture in Hong Kong.
With the fund, the Co-founders were able to conduct a survey of 44 respondents and use the insights to drive forward their business plan. Said Co-founder Saiksha Gurung: “We would really like to thank FSI and Gerard for the donation. We have never received any mentorship before, but after completing the Mentorship Program, we now know how to make use of resources shared with us. In 2023, we plan to expand our platform to offer not just books but also other types of materials.”
A Home Sustained by Peer Support and Knowledge Exchange
When we started the Mentorship Program, we wanted to build a community, but to our mentees and mentors, it has come to mean so much more than that. “I find a home every time I attend this FSI program, it’s where I go whenever I need something. I have found a community.” said Nimisha Vandan, Co-founder of OkayMinds, mentor to Mahum Shaikh, and also our collaborator who conducted the Mental Resilience workshop.
“Being a mentor is also being trained yourself. Joining this Mentorship Program has been a self-discovery journey for me, as I learned how to cope with my weaknesses and lead others,” said Henry Kam Yuen Yeung, seasoned entrepreneur and mentor to The Blomstre. “I recently started a new venture in health tech, and I hope to enter the next cohort to continue my volunteer work in sharing my marketing and sales expertise with other mentees.”
More Long-term Support and Institutional Accountability Essential to Social Inclusion in HK
For the second half of the session, we opened up the floor for all participants to discuss the top entrepreneurial challenges they face, and their thoughts on the Hong Kong institutions that are currently providing support services to the ethnically diverse community.
In addition to the language barrier and access to information, balancing capacity and demand, connecting with the right contacts for business support, fundraising, business planning, and finding talents and skilled trainers, quite a few participants said it was difficult to gain acceptance from the local community and reach out to the local market.
“Many of the NGOs subvented by the Hong Kong government run community centres that claim to help ethnic minorities, but all they do are small, one-off activities that have no long-term impact, unlike what FSI does,” said Luisa Tan Castro, an educator, Co-founder of the Institute of Leadership and Management Foundation Limited, and a mentee of our program. “The problem is that these NGOs continue to receive funding, and we are used as ‘cash cows’, the token ethnic minorities beneficiaries, so that some people continue to get paid. We need better research on issues related to ethnic minorities in Hong Kong, and we need to assess the impact of these community centres.”
But even when support services are available, the information isn’t always easily accessible. “In Australia, where I grew up, the government is culturally aware and adopts a multilingual approach to communicating its messages,” said Jenny Au, Founder and CEO of FundFluent, and our collaborator who conducted the workshop on fundraising and financing opportunities. “Much more work is needed to improve information accessibility here in Hong Kong. The way information is disseminated hasn’t caught up with the changes in how we consume information.”
However, information isn’t the only area that has an accessibility problem. “Many institutional grants that aim to improve social inclusion often have a lot of restrictions on how and on whom the money can be used,” said Christine Vicera. “If your goal is social inclusion, then you’ll need to involve more than just the ethnic minorities as beneficiaries.”
We would like to thank all the aspiring and seasoned entrepreneurs from our Mentorship Program, and the skilled volunteers from our Community Connections Program for participating in the interactive discussions on 13 December. The feedback and recommendations will be consolidated and used to inform our programming going forward, as part of our core mission to improve diversity, inclusion, and representation in Hong Kong.
“Remember, your success is our success. There’s no expiry date in our support and the community,” said Vivian Seo, Program Manager at FSI and curator of the Mentorship Program. “Adnan (Riaz) and I are planning to create a business directory to increase the visibility of ethnically diverse businesses in Hong Kong. However, there is a limitation to how FSI can customize our resources for you and others like you. So help us understand your needs, so that we can continue to create and enrich our resources and offerings!”
Are you an ethnically diverse entrepreneur interested in joining our next cohort as a mentee or a mentor? Are you passionate about improving diversity and inclusion in the Hong Kong entrepreneurial space? Find out more about the entrepreneur’s journey in the past three months in this yearbook, and get in touch with us on cbs@shared-impact.com to learn more how you can participate in or support our Mentorship Program!
