Travelling in 3 different time zones within 3 days is an amazingly crazy journey! To be a social entrepreneur, you always need to be well-prepared to embrace the changes and challenges and to make yourself uneasy to make an easier world!

Here, in ECSEL, although you feel exhausted by the substantial activities, you would never be willing to close your eyes or ears for a second to miss any of the moments, but rather spend all of your time communicating with different people, listening to suggestions from different perspectives, and thinking about how to make a better proposal, better Self, and a better society!

Take myself as an example. I wish to build-up a platform to help the Chinese traditional artisans with marketing and financing work for their creations (handicrafts and other form of art). Originally, it is only an idea in the baby stage, but the ECSEL experience helped me clarify the blueprint for the next step. On the bus towards the lectures, chatting with different students and exchanging ideas about our programs, I got illumination from their projects, and meanwhile, during the answer of “how” and “why” of my project, I considered more deeply issues that I have never thought about before for my project.

The pitch presentation is of great help. During the first round, I got many fantastic feedback, both positive and negative. I feel dividing audiences into two groups with “green card” and “red card” for different voices is extremely brilliant, so that I can get confirmation and also realize my weaknesses. And luckily, I was the winner in the first round to compete for the second. Although I failed in this round, I am excited about other excellent proposals and feel inspired since we have so many friends together to dedicate for a better world. I learned a lot from the winners and feel they deserve the prize. Since all I obtain is warmth and support from peer members and judges, “Losers” doesn’t feel sad, but only feel proud of the winners”. “True love doesn’t necessarily mean gazing at each other, but looking outward in the same direction.” Social enterprise is different from other business field: We don’t have real competitors, but all look into the same direction and work for the same goal. Even when we work in the same field, we only help each other to create a better world instead of competing for the profits with each other. So, ECSEL is just a “family get-together”.

I also learned a lot during other sessions. In the University of Pacific, the speakers were really brilliant and they taught us knowledge and skills, and shared with us their own experiences. I was extremely impressed by a speaker from Stanford's d.school, who taught us to think from the perspective of “customer” by having exercises step by step. I become more clear about what I should do after the explanation, and found out it is really important to put ourselves into others’ shoes.

During the mingling activity in the Univ. of Berkley, we can choose to talk with different social entrepreneurs in different fields around different tables. That was amazing! I was lucky enough to consult a Brazilian-Chinese woman working in the same field of fair trade as my interest and commitment. She has her business in Brazil and China for promotion of traditional handicrafts for many years and has much experience to conquer varieties of problems. I asked her tons of questions, and got all satisfying answers from her. She was so nice that she even gave me the list of the resource I can utilize. We are keeping in touch with each other now, and have talked about my internship following her to study the knowledge and accumulate the experience in this field this summer holiday!!!

During the break, we also have the chances to talk with some great investors. Although one investor told me about the infeasibility of my project and said “I am sorry that all of the similar projects as yours I have known failed”, I still feel benefited, since I know he is just like “Papa” and kindly warned me about the riskiness and also provide useful suggestions to make it more practical.

The founder of this program, Mr. William Schoenfeld, is extremely brilliant and humorous, speaking great “Beijing Qiang”Chinese, also offered a speech, which is so inspiring that I was moved to tears. I know I was so lucky to be selected into this group and really need to work harder to return the society. The program is short, but the influence is sustainable; the delegates are limited, but the people getting involved are world-wide.

I couldn’t think of any program better than ECSEL if young leaders do wish to change themselves and the world---not for the free trip to US with great hotels and delicious food and elaborate care, but for opening our eyes to the world, speaking with the world, and committing ourselves to make a better world with these great people in such wonderful time!

Zhang Yuan, HSBC Biz School, 2010 delegate