Joe上個月去印度GSG的年會。

我們本來要去，後來沒有去的？

對，他是唯一臺灣的代表。因此他有一些資訊要對，第二個是我們的聚會，可能會請Joe，因為他是GSG的顧問，所以也請他帶一下整個大pictures。

至少讓大家知道在global context這邊是要做什麼的。

還有就是multi-stakeholder的approach跟collaboration這一些，我覺得Joe很有經驗。我們大概也邀了二、三十位主要的，按照ecosystem分類的，都會來下週12/19在社創中心舉行的「台灣GSG影響力投資諮詢委員會 Taiwan NAB」籌備暖身小聚#1。

太棒了。

Joe，交給你了。

我稍微自我介紹一下，我9月有去聯合國。

對，我們身上這個SDGs徽章，只有聯合國才有（笑）。

我過去做很多是用系統思考、系統變革的方式，把多方利害關係人放在一起，讓大家可以collect action，也有做聯合國顧問，像SDG的mapping。

這一次也有幫GSG，他們想說用systems mapping的方式，把整個impact investment ecosystem，可以用causal loop的方式map起來，將來可以用這個方式來coordinate collective action，我們已經做了第一版，也有一個report，今年在India就已經有發表。

現在在想有更多實際可操作的，就是可以在這個map 讓所有人知道在自己哪一個位置上，可以共同創造一個ecosystem for impact investment，這是一個on going跟他們的連結，我想說可以幫臺灣建立我們自己的map、多方利益關係人，用這個來engage多方利益關係人的systemic approach。

所以很重要的是要建立一個network，而這個network，在founding的時候，怎麼建立network leaders so we have a similar language，我個人的想法是，既然我有做這個mapping，how can we also bring it here in Taiwan，我們有自己的map，用這個map來做collective action的策略。

這一次我們籌備會議……

……我想問一個程序問題，你在想這一些事的時候，是用英語想還是用華語想？

以前是用英語比較多，現在華語好一點。

我們可以從頭到尾用英語講，如果這個讓你的工作容易一點的話。

我自己揭露一下，我想這一些是用英語想的。如果我們分別在腦裡翻譯華語，中間已經不知道掉了多少百分比了。

所以我想切換一下語言，如果你可以的話（笑）。

Let me just very quickly recap what I’ve heard. You already worked on facilitating the GSG report that’s published in India. You’re the main facilitator for that?

For, yeah, creating the map with them.

That’s great. Then the 2.0, so to speak, is going to be launched when?

We don’t know yet. This is in the process.

That’s just an idea?

They have interest in making it more expanded. We’re talking about it, and I want to find a prototype site. We’re interested in Taiwan.

The idea is that in Taiwan, we prototype this more action-oriented, more detailed way of conversation among the stakeholders?

That’s right.

Then we create a kind of model, because it is going to be a microcosm of what we want other regions to happen?

Totally.

I see the system action. The next question is that, what’s going to be the, from your viewpoint, one year from now, the output of this multistakeholder process? As you well know, to bootstrap something, you probably need a common excuse for people to put their time together.

Given the social atmosphere here, we have some important timelines. For example, the National Social Innovation Action Plan, which is a four-year plan. It targets the next four years. It’s up to 2022. Up to 2022, there is a national strategy for social innovation that you can leverage to bring the 12 ministries together.

We already did some mapping. It’s all public information. I can send it to you, anyway. The timeline is going to coincide, I think, very well with the map. The plan itself, as you can see, is a continuation of a previous four-year plan.

We focus, at this point, around various different organizational types. For example, co-ops were not featured prominently when Minister Feng-Yun was in charge of the previous four-year plan. Now, they are now given equal footing, especially 合作社型態, the co-ops, along with the NPOs and companies.

Of course, when we’re talking about impact investment, we understand, of course, only company can take investment. The hybrid organizations is where we’re now working on.

As of November, all the NPOs, whether they’re associations or foundations, they can now set up closely held subsidiary companies to receive investment for their for-profit version, the part of their previously nonprofit work.

The idea of with-profit is now gaining momentum, because the legal structure now allows it to happen. What I mean concretely is that previously, there was no common index of the work that each ministry is doing on their own.

Now, we’re committed to use the 17 SDG areas, and the 169 targets, which is why we wear it on our t-shirt all the time, to make sure that people index. For example, you can see the university social responsibility, and here, you see the more traditional incubator stuff.

Here, you see, for example, the co-ops, associations, and so on. Now, because they now all report to the same sustainable goals, there is much more synergy within the ministries that we’re now seeing across the ministries to form a pipeline.

That’s the four-year plan, and I’ll be leading it, at least for the next year or so, [laughs] but we’ll see.

I’m just saying that the index of the SDGs is really the main difference now, compared to the previous impact investment, which is more MDCN, MOEA-led. Now, it is all the ministries see that, "Oh, it is something that we can leverage as resources."

That’s the picture from the government side. The question I want to ask is because we want to, in the national strategy itself, to basically leverage all the research, academia, and the PWC and KPMG’s contributions on what does social benefit actually mean?

What does social impact actually mean? That is the burning question. It is going to lead the next three years of the national action plan. We’re going to spend a year on getting the picture of what do we mean when we say social impact in a meaningful way?

If the GSG multistakeholder partner can help tackling this, which you probably have to, anyway, if you’re going to do any kind of impact investment, then that could be a really compelling for the ministries to participate, because they’re charged with the same task...

As you can see, people here, each ministry are charged with different part of the national strategy. All of them are charged with the assessment of social benefit, or environmental benefit, but impact. That’s just the background for you.

This is a national plan?

Yeah, for four years.

For four years. Then you’re saying in the coming year, you’ll be focusing on developing the social impact measurement from each ministry?

Right.

That each ministry will take a certain...

Role.

...role, according to SDG.

Right. For example, the Ministry of Education, they will work on the university social responsibility. The coming February, they will re-index all the USR projects, using the sustainable goals.

The same for CSR and so on. Using the same language, we can discover synergies, and so on.

Got it. Just a quick question. I am aware that Taiwan also have the National Council for Sustainable Development.

Yes, that’s about things the government itself does. This is about things that are done in the social and private sector. Our main modus operandi here is just not to lead the citizens, but rather let the social innovators take lead.

We don’t block the way, or we amplify the progress. We supply supplements, but we’d never take direct control. The annual social enterprise summit, for example, we are committed to do sponsorship up to 49 percent.

The local people, the Children Are Us Foundation and Impact Hub Taipei, Social Entreprise Insights, and B Lab Taipei, they drive the agenda. We never control the agenda. That’s the plan here. The NCSD, by contrast, mostly what the government are committed to do.

I see.

That’s the main difference.

Got it. I’m also curious, is this mapping mostly mapping the issue, what are the issues in Taiwan in education, and trying to match the development plan to address those issues?

That’s very fair to say. What we’re doing here is essentially getting the idea of sustainability across, especially to the new curriculum that’s taking effect next September. Then, once people discover the local issues, then it gets indexed and surfaced.

Then we do a lot of matchmaking to encourage people to solve and tackle those issues. People who do solve those issues, if they’re integrated into the supply chain, for example, of either larger corporations or enterprises, then we give out awards and so on to encourage them to build the ecosystem.

That’s the main idea. It’s fair to say that the social and environmental issues are the main output of the discovery process.

I see, interesting. I’m hoping there is some kind of synergy, because this work is about mapping the issue, very systemic challenges facing in Taiwan. Then you’re matching those with various civic society...

Co-ops, and whatever.

...and social enterprise who have solutions to address those issues. You’re matching that. I think what we are trying to do is then going another layer, which is the financial capital...

Social financing.

Social financing, how they can finance various social enterprise to address those issues. That’s the...

What I’m saying is that previously the associations and NPOs, they think they are disconnected with impact investment, because by structure, they cannot take investment. Now, through this subsidiary corporation formulation, they can now legally take investment by setting up a subsidizing subsidiary, a closely held company.

Now, they are part of the recipients of impact investment, potentially. They don’t have to do a transformation of their structure. That was what Professor [sp] Feng-Yun was worried about. She was worried about that the NPOs will be lured to give up their original structure, because there are still parts that require charity structure to help.

Now, by saying, we’re not convincing them to become a company. We’re convincing them to set up subsidiary companies that can receive investment.

I think...

Feel free to go back to your context.

That’s wonderful as a background. You asked about what the one-year outcome is together. What I’m envisioning is Taiwan’s national plan for impact investment. I think that’s what NAB is tasked to do, is to develop our national strategy for how we’re going to build an ecosystem for impact investment.

It’s a plan. It’s both a strategy, but also, I think they will be down to this action plan. If we just follow from GSG’s mandate, the goal is this national plan will specify how we will help reach the tipping point end of 2020.

I would envision, we want to create a draft plan, and then ideally, we are ready to apply the membership with the GSG, right?

Correct.

This is something that I refer to when I think about social financing. This is the social financing strategy of Canada. They are put together by a clearly multistakeholder process. What I like about it is that it is interwoven between the policy and regulatory environment, which are their demands to the government.

Then also, concrete cases that’s already working, which is a showcasing of local government. In a sense, it is basically municipalities figuring out smaller, quicker wins by using this strategy to surface the structure behind it.

The Taipei SE Square would be a very good example. Telling the other municipalities and other people in the country, if you do it this way, then social financing can actually work. They put a lot of emphasis on social innovation data, and evidence and knowledge sharing.

Some structure like this is what I have in mind, but it may not be what you have in mind. I just want to collaborate a little bit of our expectations.

I haven’t really put too much thought into what that structure would look like. I think part of it will be co-created with the group.

We can look at the outline, which has the main structure, that is more or less what this is about.

Yeah, probably...

How’s it like, and what we would like to see.

Yeah, probably something similar. I would envision the map, that we’ve been talking about that. Systems map was somewhere in here. They help guide. All this are different parts.

That’s right.

It would be good to have a shared picture of how all are interconnected.

How they integrate into each other. I think that would be great.

Are these happen soon, or for Taiwan?

This is already...

Taiwan’s social financing strategy?

No, the thing is that their strategy is both SI and SF, but we only have an SI plan. At the moment, there is no national social financing plan. In Canada, they did it together in the co-creation. That is also because in Canada, if you look at the people who actually participated in the co-creation process, it’s really across the board.

All these groups, they basically, maybe they didn’t have anything to do with social innovation to begin with. Maybe they were just financiers, or people who work in investment. Because of the social financing banner, they get attracted, and become a stakeholder.

When we did the consultation -- by we, I mean both [sp] Feng-Yun and me -- did a consultation, we put more highlight on the entrepreneurship part, which attracted different kind of stakeholders. I’m not saying it’s bad, but it doesn’t naturally attract investors.

I think the approach makes, currently, there is a tangible void in the social financing strategy, if you look at our official documents, which is something Ray is working very hard to remedy.

Maybe I think as GSG preparation office, we can draft a similar, very...

I’m not saying the wording. I’m just saying the stakeholder composition determines the scope. Obviously, from this stakeholder composition, they are going to embed social financing with municipalities, with social innovation. When we did a social innovation plan, our stakeholder group is not like this.

I see. We already have a...?

We had a consultation, a year-long consultation between the two plans. It used to be called the Social Enterprise National Strategy. Then I become the minister in charge for it two months, and then the strategy ends.

It used to be a four-year plan. Then after the two months, there’s a year of public consultation, where I just tour around Taiwan and talk to stakeholders. It’s all on public record. After one year of consultation, the four-year plan gets ratified.

I didn’t in my regional tours, because of the thematic thing is still on social entrepreneurship. We didn’t attract as much established investors in our consultation meetings. Therefore, the action plan did not actually put too much emphasis on social financing. That’s the thing. I’m seeing the need to remedy that.

This, what we’re trying to do, could potentially help.

That’s right. Also, in the first year of the social innovation plan, we’re charged to do social impact assessment, anyway. That is a natural segue into social financing.

I see, OK. Your timeline, you say that...

The four-year starts counting January next year, like in a few weeks.

In a few weeks.

In a few weeks. That’s the official starting point of the new four-year plan.

The plan’s already been drafted?

It’s already ratified. It’s ratified.

Not just...

We’re technically already running for a few months, but without budget.

All the new budget have to come, starting January. There will be dedicated budget to maintain this place, to do, as you said, the issue mapping, the matchmaking, and whatever. That budget comes next January, which is a few weeks from now.

Then how do we envision this work, as we go through this process, picking to convene the finance stakeholder, and developing the national plan, this plan? I’m just thinking about how might we connect...

Proceed. The main research work, I think, is going to be done by MOEA for most of the issue mapping work. The MOEA, of course, has many other friends. The KPMG and TIER have been staples in holding the structure of, for example, a census of social innovation and so on.

I think there’s a stakeholder map that I can send you later about the new funding that will enable a collaboration between quite a few groups that are already doing mapping work. Not necessarily around social financing, but around social impact and social issues.

Maybe the first step is just to get people to know each other. I think that’s the main thing.

I think, from our side, what we are planning is, we will have this initial meeting. We will see who is interested in coming to the core team, the core group. The goal is to co-develop a national plan for impact investment using the systems mapping approach to engage and convene the stakeholders.

Once we have the list of stakeholders, we will probably need to have a process of beginning to, through interview or through some kind of mapping, to map out the national strategy. I can envision sometime down the road, we will have a stakeholder workshop, using the map as a tool to convene the stakeholders to identify the leverage points.

That will be the input for our national strategy for the impact investment.

The timeline is like, we kick off now, but within, I don’t know, a quarter or so, we get a rough idea of how things should look like in the end. Then for another quarter or two, we do systematic interviews, research work, and things like that, and more consultations.

Maybe leaving Q4 for a more, like if you were doing design thinking, a more converging, "how may we..." question. It would probably have to end there, because the implementation is up for, of course, everybody to do their part. We only do the first diamond, so to speak.

Yes, that’s this. This is a larger planning process. My understanding also on Ray is that there will already be some project going on concurrently, like the SIBB, Social Impact Bond and Barriers.

Yeah, the sandbox people is working with you on identifying possibilities. I would say the SIB is also not yet in this phase. It’s still in the forming phase. It’s still formative.

Initiatives. We can keep going.

For this process, as we convene stakeholders and co-create our national plan for impact investing, we will be prepared to apply for...

For the GSG, right. How does GSG participate or not during this process? Are you completely on your own?

I think they will offer some kind of guidance in the preparatory phase. Either some kind of template documents we could follow, some kind of advice along the way. This is where, because I have a connection with them on this previous project.

I would like to continue to use that, while mapping that more generic map, but then can apply in that context.

This is already there, and it’s a part of a larger map?

Yes.

OK, that’s good.

Actually, I’m just, there’s a practical issue. For this, some kind of convenient process. I don’t know what Ray thinking about. In the future, we might need to set up some kind of board, some kind of committee, some kind of...

Some kind of folks who co-own this thing.

Yeah.

I think the purpose of next Wednesday’s gathering is to get people who are interested in, right? [xx] courting to do this, where we all meet.

Very much so.

We have some initiatives. Of course, I think the mapping will be the first thing, the high level mapping. We can do that with many smaller group, many 7, 10 people, next round, next meeting. After Wednesday’s, next Wednesday’s.

I think that works for me.

Basically, collect all the stakeholders who are highly interested in this, so we can start up something together.

Cool.

I’m curious, when this gets developed in the future, I don’t know about the plan here. If there is some sort of budget, funding, are there some resource available for supporting this type of work?

Yeah, that’s exactly as I said. We had allocated funding for the systemic mapping of social issues, and the ways that we can apply civic technologies to solve these issues. It’s not a huge amount of funding, but it’s not trivial, either.

It’s already being formulated, and it’s already being carried out, actually, as we spoke about the MOEA-related folks, which is why it’s important to get to know these folks. They’re charged with delivery, but if you can accelerate their delivery, then you become natural partners.

I see, got it.

I think that’s the main research funding for the government for the next year, because we do have a specific target, too, that everybody know what social impact measurement actually means across ministries.

SIB, of course, is part of it. Whatever methodology you bring about, as long as it ties into the goal, I’m sure that they will welcome it.

I have already invited KPMG, but TIER, who I should invite?

I will invite the key person to come next Wednesday.

Have you invited anyone from the MOEA SMEA, like senior executive officer Linda Huang?

I’ve invited Linda.

That’s good. Linda virtually coordinates the entire team.

She’s the boss.

She’s the boss. If you are just talking about strategy, then just talk to her. Linda is in charge of the carrying out of the strategy.

I see.

If Sheau-Tyng has time, then of course, Sheau-Tyng can be around as well.

Beginning in 2019, ST will become my executive secretary, so her presence is my presence.

Everybody knows that when ST put things on my calendar, I will be there. Things that I put on my own calendar, I might not be there.

I’m just a walking spokesperson for my executive secretaries.

Nice, OK.

That’s the basic shape. The GSG, you will be in constant touch with the GSG in each milestones. The methodologies they provide, it will be equally accessible by people in the stakeholder group.

In the stakeholder group.

That’s the only thing I need to know.

I see, yeah. I guess that’s... Then after that, we will apply, and then we will find out. Oh, there will be a complication, also, we know because of the Taiwan-China issues and all that. Although we just prepare as much as we can, if on the inevitable day...

Surely, the PRC is not joining next year?

No.

It’s less of an issue then.

They have their issues.

For all practicalities, like when I visited Open Government Partnership, which is some structure very much like the GSG -- it’s a hybrid government, civil sector, multistakeholder thing -- I gave keynote in the Paris Open Government Partnership Summit with the title of Taiwn’s Digital Minister, but with Taiwan classified as a nonprofit.

So there is a nonprofit called Taiwan, and I’m its digital minister. Maybe that kind of minister, as in preaching.

I’m very flexible, personally. People who work on the social innovation plan is blessed by the SDGs. Whenever PRC raises an issue, we can say, "You also agreed on the sustainable goals yourself."

As long as we’re within the SDGs framework, so far, I’ve never heard any direct conflict with the PRC, even in UN-related meetings, of which Ray attended one, but there is many more. I think we’re relatively safe.

When it comes to sustainable goals, we’re all global citizens, anyway. We’re good.

OK.

All right, I guess we need to run. Thank you for dropping by.

Yes, thank you, again.

Thank you.