Building a new type of giving in China

Chinese SVP partners have a group meeting in Beijing recently. SVP China has attracted the participation of 35 Chinese partners in Beijing. PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

If you are a member of China’s growing middle class and try to do something to create social value and serve the common good, how many options do you have?

You can donate money to charities, but as skepticism about their spending has grown, people have begun to ask if it is wise just to give foundations money to pick what causes and groups they will support. Even if you donate money to a rural school or support students from poor families, your options are still limited in China.

That’s why American scientist, entrepreneur and venture philanthropist Lance Fors has been to the country more than 10 times for the past five years to promote a model of venture philanthropy known as “social venture partners”.

“At least twice a year, one to two weeks each time,” he told China Daily in Beijing. He paid his own travel expenses each time.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and his doctorate from the California Institute of Technology in molecular biology, the 50-year-old became founder and CEO of Third Wave Technologies, building it into a leading publicly traded biotechnology company that made products that enabled the early detection and treatment of cervical, colorectal, liver and other cancers.

Since selling Third Wave 10 years ago, he has focused on social change and entrepreneurship. He is former chairman of Social Venture Partners International and has concurrently been the long-time board chair of several social ventures in the United States. He has helped these social ventures successfully transform from start-up enterprises to the leaders in their fields.

Included among them is the New Teacher Center, an independent nonprofit founded by teachers in 1998 as part of the University of California at Santa Cruz and dedicated to improving student learning by accelerating the effectiveness of new teachers and school leaders. As the board chair of NTC, Fors has helped turn it into a national social venture in new teacher induction, which raised $23 million of growth capital in 2014. Annually NTC supports over 6,300 mentors to improve the effectiveness of 26,000 teachers across the country, amounting to 10 percent of all US new teachers and principals, he said.

He added: “Philanthropy is giving treasure, giving money. For venture philanthropy, it’s giving treasure, plus your own time and talent.”

Fors compared venture philanthropists with venture capitalists. Venture capitalists will invest in companies for profits. Venture philanthropists will invest in companies to “make social gain, not financial gain”.

“A very good venture capitalist who put money, plus time and talent into building a company is a very good analogy for a venture philanthropist. So it’s beyond the money, really investing your time, your talent and your network.”

Venture philanthropists are like farmers who plant a lot of seeds and try to find which one of those is going to be a very important social change-maker, he said.

“So we look to plant seeds more like very early-stage investors. We watch those companies we think to have high potential and then help them grow to medium size, and hopefully, to very large scale … We think of ourselves as primarily investors in early-stage organizations, then we nurture them like parents.”