Philanthropy in environment

A new phil­an­thropic group made out of entre­pre­neurs from main­land China brings the envi­ron­men­tal issues to the forefront.

By ELEANOR YAP

A pro­fes­sional net­work of entre­pre­neurs from main­land China have come together under a grant-​making foun­da­tion called World Future Foun­da­tion (WFF) to address envi­ron­men­tal and social con­cerns. WFF believes that util­i­sa­tion of the power of wealth com­bined with new tools, skills, meth­ods or ideas in the non-​profit sec­tor are keys to solv­ing world­wide envi­ron­men­tal and social issues.

Founded by Dr Feng Lun, who has enjoyed suc­cess in the real-​estate sec­tor in China, his first-​of-​its kind organ­i­sa­tion gives fund­ing for research in Sin­ga­pore. The organ­i­sa­tion, which is based in Sin­ga­pore, has a board of direc­tors com­pris­ing of indi­vid­u­als from China and Sin­ga­pore, as well as a con­sul­ta­tive com­mit­tee of pro­fes­sors from NUS and NTU includ­ing Pro­fes­sor Tan Thiam Soon, Pro­fes­sor Heng Chye Kiang and Pro­fes­sor Ng Wun Jern.

SALT Online sits down with Lu Bo, man­ag­ing direc­tor of WFF, to find out more about the organ­i­sa­tion, why it gives to Sin­ga­pore and the envi­ron­ment con­cerns that WFF feels pas­sion­ate about:

Can you explain why your Foun­da­tion focuses on envi­ron­ment issues?

We believe envi­ron­men­tal issues are a seri­ous con­cern today and there are no national bound­aries for con­duct­ing research in this area. Inter­na­tional col­lab­o­ra­tion is needed in order to solve envi­ron­men­tal issues because one coun­try can­not solve them alone. This is an impor­tant issue to our founder, Dr Feng, and some­thing he has focused on in China, before com­ing to Sin­ga­pore. He has set up a num­ber of char­i­ta­ble foun­da­tions in the past eight years, with WFF being the only one out­side China.

At the cen­tre of our Foundation’s con­cern is the envi­ron­ment and sus­tain­abil­ity research, mainly on nat­ural and social envi­ron­ment. We have focused in the past heav­ily on the nat­ural envi­ron­ment but this year, we are look­ing to get into new pro­grammes deal­ing with the social area. In terms of nat­ural envi­ron­ment, I am talk­ing about cli­mate change, usage of water, new energy and lifestyles in urban areas, while social envi­ron­ment, mean­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ing, the rela­tion­ships between indi­vid­u­als and soci­ety, and urban man­age­ment. Both are impor­tant to humankind.

You are based in Sin­ga­pore. Are you look­ing at hav­ing a base else­where or giv­ing out­side of Singapore?

We cur­rently want to focus our efforts in Sin­ga­pore and not other coun­tries for the time being.

Can you explain WFF’s giv­ing in Singapore?

Most peo­ple give money to the needy but that is only one aspect of char­ity. The other is inno­va­tion. In dif­fer­ent coun­tries, there are dif­fer­ent pri­or­i­ties. For instance, in China, most dona­tions are being allo­cated to edu­ca­tion, poverty alle­vi­a­tion and dis­as­ters, while in the US, a more devel­oped coun­try, money goes to reli­gion, edu­ca­tion and healthcare.

We believe Sin­ga­pore is a very good plat­form to develop research on envi­ron­ment and sus­tain­abil­ity. For instance, our pro­gramme on the “PhD Prize in Envi­ron­ment and Sus­tain­abil­ity Research” was set up three years ago in NUS and NTU where we give US$10,000 to each win­ning stu­dent for a total of 10 awards given for the best the­ses geared towards solv­ing these issues. There is no nation­al­ity require­ment, it is just aca­d­e­mic. We help stu­dents from world­wide, with research ben­e­fit­ting peo­ple world­wide. We encour­age them to come to Sin­ga­pore and do research here so we are pro­mot­ing Sin­ga­pore as a national research hub.

Another pro­gramme that we have is the annual “Ver­ti­cal City Asia” Inter­na­tional Design Com­pe­ti­tion where we invite top stu­dents from 10 of the best archi­tec­tural schools across the world (includ­ing NUS) to attend our event in Sin­ga­pore every July.

Each of the schools sends two teams and we give them a real-​life sce­nario in Asia where they need to use their skills and imag­i­na­tion to design a city and allo­cate 100,000 peo­ple in 1sq km. This prob­lem of scarcity of land will con­tinue to be a grow­ing prob­lem and we feel Asia is an emerg­ing mar­ket and we want to intro­duce this mar­ket to the schools so they would con­sider help­ing to address this issue. In other words, they join the urban evo­lu­tion; it is good for their future as well as good for Asia and its people.

These pro­grammes high­light the fact that WFF is about more than sim­ply giv­ing money. We try to use the money we give to run pro­grammes to inspire inno­va­tion from the younger gen­er­a­tion, so together we can solve real world­wide problems.

Can you elab­o­rate fur­ther on this grow­ing problem?

The pop­u­la­tion in Asia is boom­ing and our resources are lim­ited. This con­flict will not be resolved in the next 20 to 50 years. In China, with our one-​child pol­icy, our birth rates have been going down in the past 35 years, how­ever, the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion is still increas­ing. Cur­rently, it stands at 1.34 billion.

We want to encour­age these stu­dents in the com­pe­ti­tion to see this real­ity. With­out the com­pe­ti­tion, they would not see Asia but only US and Europe where there is a rich sup­ply of land.

So why choose Sin­ga­pore as your base?

Dr Feng already gives in China and he felt he wanted to do phil­an­thropy abroad. We con­ducted research and paid vis­its to a num­ber of regions includ­ing the US, Europe, Hong Kong, Sin­ga­pore and more. We finally decided on Sin­ga­pore because of a num­ber of rea­sons includ­ing a sta­ble Gov­ern­ment, good trans­porta­tion and social envi­ron­ment, and a world-​class infra­struc­ture. Besides this, in 2007, the Sin­ga­pore Gov­ern­ment wanted to develop Sin­ga­pore as a regional phil­an­thropic hub, and the coun­try issued a series of poli­cies to encour­age NGOs to grow health­ily. A lot of inter­na­tional NGOs have set up their bases in Sin­ga­pore over the past years. With all this in mind, it was nat­ural that we would choose Sin­ga­pore for our base.

In set­ting up the Foun­da­tion, what chal­lenges have you faced?

Before join­ing WFF, I had more than 15 years of expe­ri­ence work­ing with inter­na­tional NGOs oper­at­ing in China, but this is the first time I’m run­ning a char­i­ta­ble foundation.

The first chal­lenge is that China and Sin­ga­pore are quite dif­fer­ent from each other in terms of the stage of eco­nomic devel­op­ment, social and eth­nic issues, legal envi­ron­ment, etc. Since we set up the Foun­da­tion in Sin­ga­pore and decided to con­tribute to the soci­ety, I’ve had to learn more about the coun­try and its people.

The sec­ond chal­lenge is that we focus on envi­ron­men­tal and sus­tain­abil­ity research, but this kind of research often takes a long time, and is very dif­fi­cult to be eval­u­ated by quan­ti­ta­tive mea­sures. How to mea­sure the out­come of our pro­grammes and sat­isfy our donors are ques­tions I think about every day.

How much money have you raised to date?

The amount raised or donated is not the most impor­tant index to eval­u­ate a char­i­ta­ble foun­da­tion. I believe the most impor­tant thing is what the Foun­da­tion is actu­ally doing and how it con­tributes to soci­ety, since it is always the foun­da­tions that are the pio­neers of social innovation.

How many donors do you cur­rently have?

Dr Feng is our major donor, but we have sev­eral oth­ers as well as a net­work of poten­tial donors. Last March, we brought 23 Chi­nese pri­vate entre­pre­neurs into Sin­ga­pore to look at how NGOs oper­ate here. Many share Dr Feng’s vision of WFF so they are all poten­tial donors to WFF.

We are the first char­i­ta­ble foun­da­tion in Sin­ga­pore funded by main­land Chi­nese and we focus on envi­ron­men­tal and sus­tain­abil­ity research. We believe we are very dif­fer­ent from other foundations.

You men­tioned on your web­site that WFF fol­lows “the lat­est trend in the devel­op­ment of global phil­an­thropy and the only way to set­tle com­pli­cated social and envi­ron­men­tal issues”. Can you explain?

Rich peo­ple give to the poor – it was like this in the past. Now, with envi­ron­men­tal and social prob­lems becom­ing more com­plex, the rich giv­ing to the poor is not enough to solve the prob­lems. We believe three key things are impor­tant. One is rich peo­ple – or what we call “power of wealth”, another is the non-​profit sec­tor and the last being new tech­nol­ogy. Only if we col­lab­o­rate with all these three fac­tors, can we solve the real­i­ties and the challenges.