For society to flourish, businesses must be empowered from the ground up. That is the ethos behind the landmark master agreement signed between SUSS and WE-Empower, a corporate social responsibility initiative of Succession Advisory Partners, in July 2023.
This new collaboration will enable partnerships between business families and grassroots family enterprises in ASEAN and China, with WE-Empower leading this initiative by assembling philanthropic funding and resources. SUSS will be the knowledge hub and provide research expertise, while grassroots family enterprises will contribute indigenous knowledge and innovations.
“What sets grassroots family enterprises apart is that these grassroots family enterprises are often driven by a strong sense of social responsibility and a desire to make a positive impact on their immediate surroundings. They identify gaps in the local market, recognise the needs of their community and develop solutions to address them,” says Professor Tan Tai Yong, President of SUSS.
“By empowering grassroots family enterprises, we are not merely helping to build and grow their social enterprises; we are also creating a ripple effect of positive change.”
Not I but We-Entrepreneurship
SUSS and WE-Empower will co-create the design, development and delivery of programmes and initiatives in social entrepreneurship and innovation, while SUSS faculty and students will team up with business families to launch studies into existing challenges and create innovative solutions for grassroots communities to implement.
Speaking on the importance of “we-entrepreneurship”, or stakeholder capitalism, Mr Melvyn Goh, Co-Founder and CEO of WE-Empower, emphasised the value of making the wealth of the rich relevant to the rest of the community to reduce the income gap and for these communities to flourish.
“It is about using financial capital in a blended way – as gifts and grants, as well as investments – to appropriately encourage this bottom-up flourishing. When the quality of life at the base of society flourishes, there is greater wealth creation through better purchasing power and behaviours that conserve and restore the environment,” he says.
A Tripartite Effort
To kickstart this collaboration, grassroots family enterprises, including one focusing on rehabilitating degraded lands for bamboo farmers in Indonesia, have been selected and an Indonesian business family will fund this initiative.
“By engaging in corporate social responsibility initiatives together, SUSS, donors and grassroots family enterprises can leverage each other’s resources and accomplish together what cannot be done alone,” says Mr Leng Lim, Co-Founder and Chief Programme Officer of WE-Empower.
“This proposed partnership for the bamboo project demonstrates how entrepreneurial drive, ambition and competencies can be channelled towards social good as stakeholders in each other’s future,” he adds.
