Entrepreneur James Chen is chairman of a family manufacturing business; he has invested in restaurants like the trendy Momofuku; and he helped pioneer the concept of “family offices,” which manage wealth for high-net-worth families, in China.
It’s a resume with plenty of talking points. But in his social circles in Hong Kong, Mr. Chen says, he is a bit of “an odd bird.” That’s because the 55-year-old dedicates up to 70 percent of his week to socially minded investing and philanthropic work that includes building school libraries and developing technology and distribution models to address vision impairment in the developing world. After a dozen years of study and many millions of dollars in donations, he is an expert on those topics and a hands-on donor, a rare breed in China.
“Most of my peers, they have done well, and they are happy to write checks. A lot of them write big checks,” Mr. Chen explains during two telephone interviews with The Chronicle. “But they don’t understand or feel they need to spend time or effort to understand the issues.”
Most recently, Mr. Chen spent $3 million to create a vision-correction campaign called Clearly. It included a competition for charities, researchers, and technology companies to develop new solutions to help the visually-impaired, the number of whom the World Health Organization puts at 285 million. The campaign was endorsed by the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. The top three entrants, announced in October, were awarded $100,000, $50,000 and $25,000.
“It’s not about us having all the answers,” says Mr. Chen, who has worn glasses since he was a teenager. “It is about us posing the question and sharing what other people are thinking, and creating this awareness and platform for coming up with some solutions.”
A Father’s Legacy
The story of Mr. Chen’s philanthropy starts with his father, who grew up poor in the 1930s and ’40s in a small town called Qidong in China’s Jiangsu Province. Decades later, the older Mr. Chen, by then a successful businessman, began paying for and overseeing public projects in his hometown, building schools, medical facilities, roads, and bridges.
The younger Mr. Chen occasionally accompanied him to the region. By the early 2000s, he realized that while his father was creating an extraordinary legacy of good works, it lacked something he admired about philanthropy in the United States and other places: structure and perpetuity.
James Chen was exposed to the idea of private family foundations and strategic philanthropy after starting a family office, Legacy Advisors, in 1995 and attending family-office conferences in the United States. He proposed to his parents and sister that they formalize his father’s many years of work with a foundation.
It wasn’t easy. While there were plenty of private foundations on paper in Hong Kong, banks often functioned as trustees, doing little more than disbursing checks. Mr. Chen wanted his family to tack in a different direction and have an active role. They hired a consultant to guide them. Even then, progress was slow. Family members had disparate ideas about worthy causes and areas of focus, Mr. Chen says. Conversations got heated. Long-ago hurts bubbled up. They eventually had to work backward, eliminating things they did not want to give to, in order to come up with a loose framework for the foundation’s grant making.
In 2003, after more than a year of discussion and planning, the Chen Yet-Sen Family Foundation was born. The senior Mr. Chen died that same year.
Focusing on Literacy
Thereafter, with the foundation quietly making small grants to support things like training for migrant women in Hong Kong, Mr. Chen traveled to his father’s hometown to visit a primary school the family patriarch had constructed.
Staffers were eager to show off a technology-laden multimedia studio. Mr. Chen asked to see the school library. They walked him to the last door down a hallway.
“They had to unlock the door. We went in. It was clear this was a disused facility. Half the shelves were empty, and I said, ‘Aha. Wow, this is interesting. This is not my concept of what a school library should be like,’ " recalls Mr. Chen, who earned his college degree in the United States.
That encounter gave way to one of Mr. Chen and the Chen Yet-Sen Family Foundation’s major areas of focus: school libraries and childhood literacy. The foundation has since paid to start or improve 200 school-library programs, an effort it named the Stone Soup Happy Reading Alliance. It began hosting international conferences for librarians and literacy advocates and eventually hired a library scientist to study the school library system across China.
In 2006, the Chen Yet-Sen Foundation gave a five-year grant — Mr. Chen declined to state the amount — to establish a Hong Kong branch of Bring Me a Book, an early-literacy nonprofit that was started in California to ensure families had access to children’s books.
But giving away books at community centers, health centers, and schools, it turned out, wasn’t enough. Many of the titles were in English. Bring Me a Book Hong Kong started getting requests for books written in the local language.
“This resonated with us,” says Mr. Chen, noting that at the time his three children were quite young. “My wife, when she traveled to Singapore and Taiwan, she would always be scrambling to go to the bookstores to buy Chinese children’s picture books. But even then she would be complaining about the relative poor quality.”
China didn’t have a long-running tradition of children’s picture books. It was less financially risky for Chinese book publishers to license the work of award-winning authors in the West than to publish, market, and sell the work of unproven local writers. And China didn’t have literary prizes like the Caldecott Medal or the Newbery Medal.
So Mr. Chen and his colleagues at the foundation and at Bring Me a Book Hong Kong decided to stoke the market for Chinese children’s books. They founded a conference for authors, illustrators, and publishers and created the annual Feng Zikai Chinese Children’s Picture Book Award. One early winning title was later translated into English and named best illustrated children’s book by The New York Times.
Personal Passion
Today, the Chen Yet-Sen Family Foundation has an annual grant-making budget of $1 million. As he the family continues to expand its philanthropy, the issue of vision impairment in the developing world remains a top personal priority for Mr. Chen. He has spent a dozen years studying and giving millions of dollars to the cause.
Despite costing the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars, vision impairment is a “super-low priority item” on the international development agenda, Mr. Chen says. One of his most significant steps to change that was to found the nonprofit Vision for a Nation and financially support an $8 million pilot project in Rwanda.
Working with the Rwandan Ministry of Health, the charity developed and delivered a three-day course to train the country’s nurses to conduct basic eye-health screenings. The program, which ends next year, has trained 2,000 nurses, who are now doing eye exams in nearly all of Rwanda’s 15,000 villages.
The Clearly campaign prize is one more way he is working to address vision impairment in the developing world, a problem he says can be solved in his lifetime.
Mr. Chen also works to integrate his philosophy on philanthropy into his role as chief investment officer at his family office. There he uses an approach he calls “blended-value investing,” or investing meant to generate financial and social returns.
One of the biggest lessons he and his family have learned in their philanthropy work, Mr. Chen says, is “if it was easy, it would have been done.”
He advises other budding philanthropists to “focus around an issue that you as a person or family can put your hands around and have the interest to work on. And then be very mindful and realistic that you’re not going to get things done and really solve the problem in one, three, five years.”
Just as great businesspeople need to know the market inside and out, great philanthropists need to know the issue they are working on as well as any academic or practitioner, he adds.
“Too often people will put in effort on the business side but then somehow think, ‘Oh, I am smart enough to make money. That means I am smart enough to give it away,’ and ‘It is easy to do.’ "