Wokai Adventures

Asian Film Festival comes to New York!

Sandy Huang is Wokai's NYC Chapter President

Exciting things are happening in New York, including the kickoff of the New York Asian Film Festival! Launched in 2002, Subway Cinema's New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) is America's leading and most influential showcase for popular Asian cinema. Each year, the Festival selects over 40 feature films, considering only the best, the strangest, and the most entertaining of the recent titles.

To date, the Festival presented over 170 films from China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam, including the works of Park Chan-wook, Patrick Tam, Takashi Miike, Andrew Lau, Feng Xiaogang, Kim Jee-woon, Lee Myung-se, Suzuki Seijun, Johnnie To, Sion Sono, Shinya Tsukamoto, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kim Ki-duk, Ryu Seung-wan, Xiao Jiang, Shunji Iwai, and many others.

The NY chapter of Wokai is very excited to be attending one of the screenings this year, and we're looking forward to seeing some of our Wokai fans at the festival as well! Check out the schedule here - the festival started on Friday, 6/19 and lasts until 7/5. Given how nasty the weather's been here, why not spend a night enjoying great films from our favorite part of the world? :)

More Information:

Website: http://www.subwaycinema.com/
Schedule: http://www.subwaycinema.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=160&Itemid=94

Wokai’s very own New York debut

Sandy Huang

Sandy is Wokai's NYC Chapter President

More than 150 people came out to celebrate at the Launch, where we raised over $6,500 in ticket sales and silent auction items. The donations raised will be able to support Wokai operations for a month, including trips to our field partners for due diligence and training, web development related to our internet platform and Beijing office operations expenses. It all started in January of this year where a small group of the steering committee of the New York chapter of Wokai got together for Swedish brunch at Smorgas Chef, in the midst of an upcoming snowstorm, to plan our strategy for 2009. After plates of eggs and smoked salmon and a large pitcher of coffee, we had outlined our plan for Wokai’s debut to New York city.

Hosting a large fundraiser is probably not the first thing you would think of when you run down the profiles of the reps in the New York chapter of Wokai – maybe creating some awesome excel spreadsheets or talking your ear off about our changing economy. But on Wednesday, May 27th, the New York chapter took the city by storm with our very first and successful fundraiser – the Launch event!

Wokai-NY partnered with BLVD, a nightclub on Bowery and Spring, to host the debut of Wokai to the grand ol’ city of New York. It was a perfect evening of open bar, delicious hors d’oeuvres, a tantalizing silent auction and an exciting presentation from Casey Wilson, Co-Founder and CEO of Wokai.

The NY reps are a group of passionate and dedicated individuals with some amazing relationships and networks. We were able to garner a selection of Silent Auction items that included a gift certificate to the Institute of Culinary Education, a one-year membership for China Institute Young Associates, a gift certificate to ZipCar, an opportunity to record at the recording studio of Ed Bennett, former President and CEO of VH-1, and a private flight in a 4-seater plane around New York City (and maybe some flight lessons!). We were also fortunate to have Kaplan as our key sponsor of the evening, who offered gift certificates to all the attendees and offered a free class to one very lucky individual!

All in all, it was a tremendous success because of the support of all the attendees and the hard work of the Reps. As I mingled through the crowd, I was often stopped by various individuals who were curious to learn more about Wokai and what we were doing in New York. After Casey’s presentation and call to action, we also had a few Reps walk around with laptops to capture names of people who were interested in joining the Wokai network and become new loaners. It was a heartwarming moment for me to look around and see each of our Reps talking to guests and to see how many individuals were genuinely interested in the success of Wokai. On behalf of Wokai and the New York Chapter, I want to say thank you to all of you who attended and for your continued support of our organization. We hope to see you at our upcoming events!

 

Concluding Remarks from Wokai SF's Inaugural Drinks for a Better World Event

Christina Zhao

Christina is the Events Associate for Wokai's San Francisco - Bay Area Chapter.

Having always wanted to turn every little activity amongst friends into an “event”, I realized that my true calling in life is event planning. With a background in finance and finance only, Wokai offered me the amazing opportunity to be in charge of chapter events and to learn as I do.

 

The Bay Area Wokai family celebrating a successful launch of our Drinks for a Better World campaign with, you guessed it, WOKA-KAZE shots!

As the newly minted Events Associate for Wokai, I am ecstatic to be sharing the wonderful news of our first fundraising event of 2009. Last Thursday (March 26, 2009), over 200 individuals gathered at San Francisco’s premier happy hour spot, Taverna Aventine, to celebrate Wokai’s inaugural Drinks for a Better World (DFBW) event. This event was a tremendous success and with everyone’s hard work and contributions, we managed to raise over $2,500 in suggested donations! To put things into better perspective, US$2,500 in China is enough to cover the cost of 40 roundtrip overnight train tickets from Wokai's Beijing Headquarters to our field partner in Inner Mongolia in addition to one full year of housing accommodations for a Wokai Fellow on location. Talk about having a long lasting impact!

The Bay Area Chapter’s DFBW campaign follows in the footsteps of our Beijing counterpart and has a vision of providing an easily accessible and social environment where young professionals with a similar desire for social change and philanthropy can come together to meet one another and to exchange valuable new ideas.

 

Thursday’s event would not have been possible without the generous support of the owners of Aventine as well as one of the most wonderful and down to earth girls I know, Summer Huff, Peroni and Pilsner account representative. With their help, Wokai was able to take over the bar from 6 to 9 pm and offer attendees drink specials such as $3 Peronis and $4 Woka-kaze shots (our take on the traditional kamikaze, another success!). Even though the event was scheduled to conclude at 9 pm, seeing so many of our guests having such a great time mingling, I did not have the heart to break up the party and the event went on until well past 10:30pm.

One of the main objectives for putting together this event was to raise awareness for microfinance in China and to spread the word about the impactful difference a simple $25 contribution can make in someone else’s life. My fellow Wokai volunteers acted as “information spreaders” that evening to ensure that every person in attendance understood our mission and all the different venues through which they can help. We were extremely successful in garnering interest and even received numerous requests from individuals who wanted to become volunteers.

This whole experience, from the planning stages, to securing a venue, to heavily publicizing to friends and colleagues, and finally to the post-event group dinner where volunteers and Wokai friends celebrated the success together, was an extremely heartwarming one. I have learned that when you are truly passionate about something, that type of enthusiasm and excitement becomes contagious to others around you and those people want nothing more than to see you succeed. And for that, I am forever grateful!

To all those who attended this event, I sincerely appreciate your support and hope that you had as much fun as I did. Please stay tuned because the next Wokai Drinks for a Better World will be even better.

In the meantime, please save the date for Wokai’s launch event “Dollars Without Borders: Growing Microfinance in China.” It will take place inside the Ferry Building on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 and will include guest speakers such as Premal Shah, President of Kiva, and Maya Chorengel, Managing Director of UNITUS Equity Fund; the premier of a short-film How the Rural Half Lives; a silent auction; as well as breathtaking views of the San Francisco waterfront. Feel free to reach out to me if you want any more details and I look forward to seeing you soon at the next Wokai event! 干杯 (Cheers)!

Media Madness: Wokai is in the Seattle Times, Danwei, and Lost Laowai!

Leslie Forman

Leslie is Wokai's Marketing Director. 

This has been a terrific day!  Casey spoke at two events in Seattle: a legal roundtable and Microbrews and Microfinance. And today we're in...

Kristi Heim, whose column focuses on the Business of Giving, wrote an excellent profile of Casey and Wokai.  It's called Microfinance: a mecca for 21st century idealism and it begins...

What can get a crowd of young, hip Seattleites more excited than an REI clearance sale or an afternoon of sun in January? You guessed it. Lending money to poor people. It helps, of course, that beer is involved.

The star of the bimonthly Microfinance and Microbrews event tonight is Casey Wilson, 24-year-old co-founder and CEO of Wokai, a non-profit that aims to expand small loans for the rural poor in China. In Chinese, wo kai means "I start."

I took some time out this afternoon to talk with her about the organization, which now has three chapters in the U.S., an office in Beijing and an army of highly motivated volunteers.

I asked her why start in China, a country wealthy enough to finance the U.S. national debt.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

If you're in Seattle, be sure to attend our launch celebration this Saturday at Spitfire.  It's sure to be a good time! 

And today...

posted the video of Casey's Tech Talk at Google in the top right corner of its homepage! 

And, Ryan McLaughlin from ...

wrote a generous profile about Wokai.  (For those of you that have never lived in China, "laowai" is a common and slightly pejorative respectful word for foreigner.) 

Ryan's article begins...

Wokai, or “I start”, is a new(ish) Web site offering microfinancing to China’s poor.

There are few things that make me tingle like the principle of microfinancing does. I’d like to think I have a philanthropist’s heart (if not the wallet), and as much as I believe “give it and forget it” charities unarguably do amazing things for this world, microfinancing is just way cooler than traditional charity models.

It brings “charity” down to a more even level, where “givers” become lenders and “the poor” become borrowers. Not only is it financially empowering, but it is emotionally empowering as well. That Courtney McColgan and Casey Wilson (Wokai’s co-founders) have taken this and applied it to China’s impoverished deserves not applause, but ovations.

Click here to read more. 

Thank you so much to Kristi, Eric Mu and Jeremy Goldkorn from Danwei, and Ryan!  We can't tell you how much we appreciate your support. 

Internship Opportunities! Web Optimization and Media Analyst

Naomi Cookson

Naomi is Wokai's Chief Operating Officer.

Our website, launched in November 2008, is the center of Wokai’s work.  In order to drive traffic to the site we are recruiting two interns to work with our Marketing Director in Wokai’s Beijing office during the spring of 2009.  Each intern will work closely with the Marketing Director and take on different areas of Wokai’s marketing plan.  We seek a Web Optimization Intern to focus on the Wokai Pilot Program (beta testing of our website), Search Engine Optimization, and optimizing the content of our website to increase our “sharability.”  We also seek a Media Analyst Intern to focus on actively listening to what media reports about Wokai.org, help identify the best publications to target for Wokai marketing, create new press releases and content for the website.  Interns will also be asked to help with office tasks, writing, and editing.

Web Optimization Intern

—    Work with Marketing Director to continue managing feedback data from website users; turn this data into concrete changes that website developers can implement.  
—    Work on streamlining and creating content for the front end of Wokai.org. 
—    Work on Search Engine Optimization and growing Wokai’s web presence
—    Optimize Wokai’s website content and increase Wokai’s “sharability” online.
—    Help staff with writing and editing

Media Analyst Intern

—    Work with Marketing Director to research and develop a list of publications Wokai should target for publicity
—    Work on understanding what media (blogs, newspapers, magazines, etc.) report and write about Wokai and develop ways that Wokai can direct or optimize such media coverage.
—    Create new press releases under the guidance of the Marketing Director.
—    Create new content for Wokai.org and work on editing existing front-end content.
—    Maintain database of newsletter sign-ups and contacts
—    Help staff with writing and editing

Requirements 

Wokai requires a minimum four-month time commitment and a contribution of fifteen hours a week.  Media Analyst Interns must have excellent communication skills in English and ideally have a proficiency in Chinese.  Web experience will be especially relevant.  They must be passionate about microfinance and development in China.  Interns must also be self-starters who take initiative and like to get involved in new projects.  Wokai welcomes applications from interested candidates of all backgrounds and age—our internship positions are not limited to undergraduate students.

Compensation

Internship positions are unpaid.  However, our interns have the opportunity to work on building a start-up non-profit from the ground up.  Interns make a direct contribution to increasing Wokai’s presence and Wokai.org’s traffic, thereby ensuring that microentrepreneurs in rural China can access the funds they need.

To Apply

Send resume and cover letter to:

Naomi Cookson: [email protected]

Please indicate your start dates.  Interns will ideally start on January 12th, 2009.  Please answer the below question in your cover letter:

What is the first idea for Wokai you would bring to your new role?

Applications will be considered until December 22th, 2008

*Please indicate your proficiency in Mandarin, if any.

Online Giving Marketplaces Conference at Stanford

Leslie Forman

Leslie is Wokai's Online Social Media Director.  She lives in San Francisco. 

This week Casey and I had the great fortune to spend four days at Stanford, learning about online giving marketplaces.  This has been such an amazing opportunity to learn from other organizations, in a very personal way. 

For the first three days, we met with the leaders of 16 different marketplaces from India, Colombia, South Africa, Argentina, Germany, Canada, and the U.S.  As the youngest organization (and youngest participants) in the group, we felt especially honored to be included.   A huge thank you to the Omidyar Network for making this possible!

The organizers brought in professional illustrator named Susan Kelly to transform these discussions into clear and colorful pictures.  Here is her record of our presentation on Wokai's chapter network, part of a session in which each marketplace shared a best practice.

Over the next few weeks, we'll post more here to share what we learned about diaspora, trust, technology, communities, and so much more. 

The final day the Stanford Social Innovation Review hosted a larger public conference  on the same topic. 

I had never heard the term Online Giving Marketplaces before this week.  It's a term that can be defined in many ways, and I really like this list of common characteristics by Lucy Bernholz, who hosted one of the sessions and is writing a book on the topic:

1:1 transactions between donor/lender and NGO/entrepreneur
Transparency
Feedback loops
Donor choice
Aggregating individual transactions (sometimes for intelligence)
Two flows in the markets - financial resources and information
Financial transactions are based on trusted information

In other words, online giving marketplaces transform philanthropy, making it more accessible and more like online shopping. 

And I sure hope that Dean Takahashi from VentureBeat is right when he says that "Social start-ups may prosper in downturn." 

Day 11 - Making progress towards launch

Casey

It's really exciting to see the progress that Wokai has made over the past eleven days.

The Beijing team has undergone a pretty radical transformation. Three weeks ago, before I left for Vietnam, our office had fourteen people, all but three of which were under the age of 21. That week we had a mass exodus of college interns, and our office occupancy went down to Zhang Sheng and I. The Monday before last, Liz, a volunteer who just finished her law degree at UVA joined us for a month stint and Naomi, our new COO, started two days later. The college group that we had this summer was awesome, but it has also been refreshing to work with my peers who bring expertise and insights to the table that will take the organization to a new level and share the burden of stress and pressure.

Our developers are driving through the website. On Monday night we finished our first round of Alpha (bug) testing and reported all of the bugs and missing features that have to be finished for launch. All said, it totaled to two hundred and forty bugs and enhancements. Luckily, Dan and Shobhit, two recent Wokai volunteers who happen to do software and website testers for a living, are leading us through this stage of development. We're planning on first finishing all of the frontend by Tuesday, then moving on to the Field Partner related admin systems so that we'll be ready for Zhang Sheng's to head to Chifeng for training on the 18th, and finally adding the finishing touches in time for us to transfer the site onto our servers by the 1st of October.

As I mentioned before, Naomi stepped on as Wokai's COO last week. Even though she has only been with Wokai for a week, she has already added a huge amount of value, both in terms of actual work as well as adding a positive presence and strength to the Wokai team. It's exciting to bring on a fellow "Chief" and potentially double the impact that Wokai will have.

Wokai is on the verge of launching version 2.0 of our business plan. Liz started are redo of our original business plan that we had published back in May of 2007 which should be ready by next Friday. This is exciting both because it will provide a strong document that we can present to potential board members, donors and foundations as well as provide us with an added level of accountability for what we need to achieve over the next 1-3 years to meet our goals.

Courtney has launched our search and development of a long-term active board of directors. Thanks to the hard work of Michelle, Carlye, and Nicholas from Penn, who spent the summer developing Wokai's board structure, strategy, and recruitment materials, we're able to start the process of picking the right people for our board and creating a strong governance structure for Wokai.

29 and counting...

Casey

Day 2 in our countdown taught me one lesson, I am not cut out for project management!

I spent the day at the developers office working with them on additions and changes to the front-end of our website. And boy are there a lot of tweeks and additions that we have to make...350 and growing... In the scheme of our web development, which probably included tens of thousands of minor features and developments, these are just the finishing touches. But, as we have learned on every project from our business plan onwards, it's the final details that take the longest and are the most tedious.

So, today my job was to be on the developers like white on rice (excuse the China microfinance pun) to make sure that we hit our Sunday goal for Alpha testing. I will spend two more days this week working out of their offices...and then we should have a fully functioning website! While it can be tedious it's an exciting task.

Another highlight for the day was a long brainstorming call with Courtney, planning for our launch and all of the other elements that need to converge for Wokai to take off.

On slot for tomorrow is our second Investment Committee meeting and the first day for our new COO, Naomi.

30 days to go...

Casey

Today not only marked the first day of September, but also the first day in our 30 day countdown of Wokia's final month pre-beta launch.  This is going to be the most intense month so far at Wokai. Over the next 30 days we have to: 1. Bug-test and prep stage 1 of the website for live Beta testing, 2. Raise funds to make it through the next 1, 3 and 6 months, and, 3. Sign our Field Partner contract, train and get our first partner online.

From the way today went, what is to come over the next month looks promising. I started my day at Hou Hai, a central lake in Beijing, meeting with Ben Marino, a freelance journalist who is doing a report on Wokai for the China Economic Review, China’s most read English language magazine.

After we finished the interview, Liz, our new intern who just graduated from UVA Law School, and I took the bus back to our office down the road. It turns out that, unbeknown-st to me, it was the best day so far to have a rising lawyer. Zhang Sheng, our Director of Field Partnerships, informed us that he had reached a stalemate with the Director of our first Field Partner on the terms of our contract. The Director wanted to insert language into the contract that our lawyers at MOFO do not believe we should compromise on. So we’re stuck…

We spent the morning debating legalese and how we could finesse the situation to put the pieces together and make it work for everyone. It was a really fun, collaborative process to engage in that kind of duologue, and more importantly, as our Field Partnerships start going live, it’s exciting to watch Zhang Sheng coming into his own. He has been working with us for the past ten months and over that time he has become proficient in MFI evaluation, contracts, html, English, accounting, finance, and negotiation. He has been a pillar of Wokai since he started. It is exciting to be at the point where he has grown into his role so well that I go to him for advice on how we should handle our partnerships. We will have to see what our Investment Committee has to say, but we left the discussion with the feeling that there are certain terms that we can’t accept, even if that means that we go ahead and launch with the partner that we had planned on working with second, and not work with the one considered to be the “best MFI in China”.

I ended the day with website testing. About two weeks ago we met with our developers and agreed that the site had to be ready for testing by this Saturday. That meant that in less than 20 days, our developers had to complete two months of development work. They are pounding through the site. Literally as I was going through the site today, looking for missing features, I was watching Ran Xin and Li Guang unveiling new functions in the site. All together I found almost 450 parts of the site that still need to be completed or tweaked, but given the speed that they have been working at over the past two weeks, we just might make it.

The next month is going to be exiting. In 2 days we’ll have a new COO, in 6 days we’ll have an almost completed testable site, in 15 days we will have a contract signed and start training, in 16 days we’ll have George, our favorite Wokai staff returning from a stint back in Great Britain, and in 30 days I return to the US for our launch and an online social marketplace conference at Stanford.

Wokai Chapters

Courtney

To develop our presence in the US, we have established the Wokai Chapter network. Wokai Chapters are responsible for spreading the word about Wokai and fundraising on behalf of Wokai operations. To accomplish these goals, Chapters hold events including educational activities, panel discussions, happy hours, house parties and informational talks. Wokai Chapters are maintained by Chapter Representatives who are 100% unpaid volunteers. To date, Wokai has established 3 US Chapters in the San Francisco, New York, and Seattle and recruited over 50 volunteers. As the organization grows, we intend to start more Chapters in other US cities.

Wokai Chapters are run by a steering committee of ten individuals including a Chapter President, Vice President of Business Strategy, Vice President of Internal Operations, Secretary, Finance Associate, Events Associate, Public Relations Associate, Intern Coordinator and Webmaster. Every month the team meets at its monthly Chapter meeting. The monthly meeting is an opportunity for the Chapter to brainstorm strategies for community outreach as well as discuss Q&A and obstacles faced. This meeting is supplemented with a monthly dial-in for the Wokai Chapter Presidents from each Chapter and the Director of US Operations. The dial-in allows all Chapters to discuss best practices, lessons learned, and future plans.

Currently our Chapters are working on building their contacts in the community. These contacts include 1.) non-profits or for-profits with similar missions 2.) potential sponsors 3.) organizations that are connected with populations of individuals that we think might be interested in visiting www.wokai.org. To network, Chapters are attending various event and reaching out to contacts. For example, San Francisco Chapter President Alice Wu attended a  conference in Los Angeles where she met YouTube Co-founder, Steve Chen, and Google China head Kai-fu Lee. She reached out to them about Wokai. And amazingly enough Kai-fu Lee had heard of us and Steve Chen wanted us to keep him tuned in for the website launch. Great job Alice!

Chapters are also involved in building internal Chapter structure and cohesion. Social events are widely encouraged. Last week, Seattle Chapter President Ketty Loeb visited the New York Wokai Chapter for a happy hour. Ketty and New York Chapter President Meghan Gill reported that it was an awesome experience to share thoughts and ideas in person. See pictures below.

Pictures (from top to bottom and left to right):

Picture 1 - Sandy Tung, Cindy Kwok, Karelis Barrios; Picture 2 - Marcy, Ketty Loeb, George Zang; Picture 3 - Lee Gao, Ji Li, Bill Louis; Picture 4 - George Zang, Meghan Gill, Lee Gao;