Inventing A Cooperative Social Enterprise

Every organisation needs a business concept. Civic Exchange's concept is to create a think tank that can add intellectual capital using a cooperative structure.

The idea of a cooperative social enterprise is new for Hong Kong. In traditional commercial enterprises, the motive is financial return. In a cooperative social enterprise, the motivation is to meet social needs. Civic Exchange is a network of people working together for common goals through the structure of an enterprise.

In 2000, we started working before we had the finances sorted out for Civic Exchange. Indeed, on day one, the co-founders had the concept, a wealth of knowledge, a wide social network of contacts, but little financial capital. Things would have become bogged down if we had looked at things from the financial end first rather than from the work that we wanted to do. It was like starting our journey on a small path that we felt comfortable with before branching out onto the main road. Using commonsense and intuition was essential to keep walking forward.

The idea of a cooperative reflects our desire for people to work together to promote social change. We respect individual ability and believe in its multiplication through working with each other. We want to run an equitable organization, where the benefits produced are fairly distributed. We want decisions to be taken democratically. We believe that we need to remain open-minded and flexible at all times so as to be sensitive to social needs as well as to new ideas.