Alliance in collaboration with WINGS has been commissioned by Propel Philanthropy to conduct a 10-part interview series on the work of Social Impact Infrastructure Organisations and the benefits they bring to the sector. This interview series aims to collectively galvanize a significant change in how funders and others think and feel about building infrastructure, unlocking global resources, and establishing robust ecosystems.

These interviews are being published here. In this instalment of the series of conversations with the representatives of social impact infrastructure organisations (SIIOs), Andrew Milner talks to Ruth Shapiro at the Centre for Asian Philanthropy and Society.

AM: Can you start off by talking a little bit about CAPS and how do you describe yourself?

Ruth Shapiro

RS: CAPS is 10 years old. We are a research, advisory and convening organisation that, although headquartered in Hong Kong, works across Asia, which means in 16 countries plus Hong Kong and Taiwan.

So you’ve got consultancy work, research work, and you do advisory work and lobbying. You’ve got quite a few strings to your bow. 

Which means we’re busy!

But you do have a lobbying role as well?

Well, lobbying is not a term we use. We say that we are a resource to government and our flagship policy piece is a study that we do every two years called the Doing Good Index, which looks at the factors which enable or impede the giving and receiving of all types of private social investment across the region. And in that study, three of the four sets of main indicators have to do with government policy – regulation, tax and fiscal policy, and procurement policy. So in that sense, we very much try to talk to government and point out that the social sector, which is the term we use to talk about both the organisations that are on the front lines as well as the philanthropic or CSR capital that’s supporting them, is pretty much aligned with government. In Asia, philanthropists do not support organisations that work counter to government, across the board. So our argument with governments is if you enable this money to flow, it will flow to the things you, the government, wants 99 per cent of the time. You think that you might be losing money if you give a tax break or a tax incentive, but actually the capital that could flow toward a sanitation project or an education project may be more than the tax income that you’re foregoing. So, we understand through our study which policies help to incentivise that kind of action, and we help governments understand that as well.

So your main thing is research?

I would say that research is the underpinning of everything else we do. I don’t feel that we could work in an advisory capacity unless we did research about what are best practices on the ground. Our research also helps to inform the conversation around our convenings.

Who do you see as your main constituency?

I would say it’s concentric circles. The first circle is absolutely philanthropists and those tend to be business leaders. It’s important to understand that in Asia, 85 per cent of all companies from small to large are family dominated, and when you think about Gates, Ford, Rockefeller, Packard, the Children’s Investment Fund, the big foundations around the world do not have counterpart foundations in Asia because most of the money is being routed through the families and thus through the company. So, philanthropists are business leaders. The second circle would be policymakers, third is media, and fourth would be non-profits and the public. Many non-profits come to us and say, ‘can you help us fundraise?’ and we don’t do that. We are trying to create systemic change to build greater accountability and transparency which we believe will help organisations be more trusted in society and enable fundraising.

Is there a specific need or gap that you see yourself as filling or that you aimed to address when you set up? 

Absolutely, yes. We look at the issues from the point of view of Asia and Asians. Up until about 15 years ago, there was this notion that Asia, Asian corporates and Asian governments were going to be more like us, ‘us’ being mostly the UK and the US. Nobody says that any more for a variety of reasons. Somehow though in our sector, there’s been a time lag in shaking off that idea, but I believe that Asia actually has very different models and strategies for addressing these kinds of problems than those that primarily come out of the United States, which has predominantly been the source of thought leadership in our fields for the last 60 years, or longer, What we set out to do when we created CAPS was to increase the quality and quantity of private social investment. This is our mission but with the very clear premise of basing our work on what incentivises and works in the Asian context. I don’t see many others that do that specifically.

Would you see that as your most important contribution?

We’ve helped to switch up the conversation and I feel good about that. There are differences in this part of the region from the rest of the world and we need to understand what motivates both governments and companies and philanthropists in a different way. I think that idea is starting to really take hold.

If you go to something like the AVPN conference, you see fewer foundations than you would do at a European or US conference. 

In Asia, it’s the principal of the company, through the company, that is really at the centre of philanthropy. The staff of these companies do attend conferences such as AVPN. There are very few foundations with large staff who have independent decision-making power.

There are differences between Asia and the rest of the world but there are also big differences within Asia as well. The culture is different and the problems are different. How much of a challenge is that for you?

I think that there are a few characteristics that are true across Asia. One is that, if you listen to a lot of talk from American philanthropists, they will say ‘here’s the problem I’m going to solve — climate change, or the lack of necessary vaccines or at-risk youth.’ In Asia — and it really doesn’t matter from Korea to Indonesia to India — what you hear is, ‘here is the community I want to help, here is the group of people I want to help.’ It’s much more the community or the group of people that is the starting point, not the problem. That’s a profound difference. The community might need a clinic, a school, or an art museum, so you might be open to any of those if your goal is to help the community. A second difference that’s true about Asia is that government is at the table from the get-go, because this is a region that cares a lot what government has to say. Part of that is back to the original point that philanthropic capital comes from business people who want to stay in business. They care about what their governments think and they work with government very closely because they know that that’s the way to get things done, regardless of the type of governance type, meaning whether or not it is a communist regime, a democracy or something in the middle, business leaders tend to work alongside government. The third thing that’s true throughout Asia is the importance of relationships. Now, many people in the West say, sure. I know that word, but what they may not understand that in Asia, relationships is absolutely the glue in society. It’s so much deeper and it infiltrates everything. The relationships are critical in every Asian economy. They’re not transaction-based, they’re relationship-based. This came up recently because, in the West right now, trust-based philanthropy is a buzz-phrase, and I’ve been saying, what do you mean? In Asia, it’s always been trust-based philanthropy. It just wasn’t called trust-based philanthropy because it was based on your relationships. So it’s not a new thing in this part of the world. The last point I would make about this is there’s a lot of attention on Asia because there’s more money here than ever before but it is important to keep in mind that, except for Korea, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan, the rest of Asia are emerging markets. On the one hand, India and China are the most sophisticated, world-class cutting-edge places, on the other hand, there’s a lot of poor people and that’s true for every Asian economy except the four I mentioned. What that means is that funding is primarily directed to one’s own country where there is still a great deal of need.

That must pose specific challenges for your work, if you have this variety of emerging economies and big demands being made on local philanthropy?

Challenge or opportunity? We’re just wrapping up a very significant study on how Asians are responding to climate change. I spoke to one foundation in the United States and the head of their environmental giving programme said, ‘we don’t even talk about climate change any more. It’s decarbonisation, decarbonisation decarbonisation.’ For our study, we interviewed 165 people in Asia, and not one of them looks at addressing climate change separate from economic development, rural development, livelihoods and so on. You cannot tease out decarbonisation from all those other things. For us, that means pointing out these alternative models. Because of this, we are working on a plan which we call CAPS 2.0, which is how we see ourselves developing over the next few years. How we’ve worked so far is to identify models, strategies, innovations that are particularly effective, and then document and disseminate them. But we think we need to create more of a platform that really elevates those personalities, those innovations, those strategies into the international discourse. So, we’re taking the ten years of lessons that we’ve learned to say, ‘there’s another way.’ I’ll give you an example: two months ago, I was at a social investment conference, and there were a bunch of people from Europe talking about sustainability standards, and they kept saying we’re all on the same path. And I said, no. We all have the same destination — zero carbon. We agree. But we are absolutely not on the same path and we had better figure out many more paths to get there. No emerging market can afford to develop in the way that Europe and the United States have developed. It’s not a viable strategy. We need a lot of innovation around this. So I think that we very much see our role of identifying those innovations and bringing them to the fore.

So that’s how you work on what we might call the big questions like climate change or inequality or whatever?

In terms of how we work, we do three types of research: policy research, applied and commissioned, and then we use that research when we convene. Until now, we’ve only been convening off-the-record, invitation-only, principal-only conferences. That’s probably going to change but, when we convene, we let people share with each other and we inform that discussion through our work.

Which of your initiatives do you think have been the most successful?

I have a two-part answer to that question. The first is our very existence 10 years on, because I think this gets back to Propel Philanthropy’s intention in funding this study. I feel with many of these organisations, certainly with us, it’s like the Starbucks model — people didn’t realise they needed a speciality coffee until they did. There are very few independent research organisations in Asia. Most are affiliated with the state, and the fact that we’ve got support from quite a few serious philanthropists and business leaders from this region speaks to the desire to figure things out in a way that’s much more local and relevant. They are also interested in having more of a voice and a platform. So I would say our own organisation is what I’m proudest of. Within that, the Doing Good Index is our flagship policy piece, as I said. It’s being used and cited globally. There are many that are in effect copying it now which is a complement. We also work with our partners who are now doing much more in terms of analysis and thought leadership, so it’s had a really nice ripple effect, not just in terms of our ability to talk to government, but building the capacity of our partner organisations about what is good work. In terms of our applied work, we can very much see how our work has changed the behaviour of philanthropic organisations in the region. That’s very rewarding.

You mentioned the fact that you exist and continue to exist as an achievement in itself. What are the factors that have contributed to that?

Our chairman and me have both been very engaged in this region for a long time. There’s a Chinese word guanxi, which means relationships, but in a deeper sense. Our original funding and ability to do this was born out of that sense of these existing relationships. but what’s happened over time is that we’ve had a more complex, deeper set of conversations with these philanthropists around Asia, and that continues to happen in a really profound way. So even though we’re ten years old, I still very much feel like we’re a start-up, but I think that helping people see that what their alternatives are, what others in their neighbourhood, their country, their community, in their region are doing is very helpful.

Are there any things you’ve launched that you feel have been unsuccessful or not paid off in the way you hoped they would do?

I think there is the time lag in the social sector in Asia that I spoke about earlier, the notion that strategies and models emanating from Asia may work better to solve local problems versus the idea that we in Asia should become versions of Western organisations. There are some alternative paths and strategies but it takes time for the message to get through. It’s not that Western models are irrelevant, in many cases, it may be the best strategy, but it is important to see the range of solutions and pick with knowledge and understanding.

We talked earlier on about being busy, how many people are you in CAPS?

We have just reached fifteen. We’re mostly here in Hong Kong, but we have staff in Beijing and Singapore. In India, what we’ve done is helped to incubate another organisation called the Centre for Asian Philanthropy India. The team there used to work with us and now is working as a separate entity. It is important to operate within the regulatory parameters of the country.

Where does your money come from? Is it earned income from research work or are you partly dependent on donations in the way that some of your client base might be?

We are currently all grants-based except for our advisory which is accounts for around fifteen per cent of our income. Of our grant funding, 60 per cent comes from Asia, and 40 per cent from three American foundations. We make subgrants to most of the partner organizations we work with.

How much of a headache is fundraising? Typically, non-profits complain about the amount of time they have to spend fundraising.

I think every non-profit chief executive spends a great deal of their time raising money. It’s part and parcel of the job. We try to get multi-year commitments and, for the most part, we’re successful in that.

What are the problems that you have as an organisation, given that you’ve got these very different constituencies to deal with in different parts of Asia?

As I said, working across the region means that we have to understand and work within the regulatory requirements of each of the countries and economies in which we operate. For example, in China, even though we’re in Hong Kong we are considered an INGO or international NGO. This means that we have to get a lot of permits to be able to do any work in China. We have to do that because, for one thing, we want to stay on the right side of the law, and for another, many of our partners in China want us to have the right permits before they work with us. And I said about our work in India, in order to continue to do it, we helped to create a separate organisation to partner with to carry out some of the work in India. The Doing Good Index however, is carried out through Hong Kong with partners in India who are able to receive funding from outside the country. Most of our donors are okay with foregoing the tax subsidy to donate to us. That doesn’t seem to be a big issue for them. I would say that talent is my second biggest issue because we are unique in that we work both wide across an entire region and deep, so we need to have a very open mind to what’s really happening. For example, there were recently elections in Thailand, what are the implications for the third sector? We need people who can stay abreast of all those things and who can analyse and write about them in English. Finding that level of talent is always a challenge although, thankfully thus far, we’ve been pretty successful. I believe that reports coming from Asia should be just as good as any in the world and fortunately, our team has been able to prove this to be the case.

Something that you’ve got on your website is building of capacity of organisations, presumably in the social sector. What does that entail?

We don’t work with non-profit organisations directly except those we partner with to carry out a study. What we do is put out rules of the road, if you will, and help philanthropists understand what operational support is about, what capacity building is about and why it’s important to support it. When we talk to non-profits, what we advise them to have a great website, to be transparent, and to have the best board that they can muster. So we give blanket, system-related advice to them. As I said, they’re not our clients. And in our studies, we look at how non-profits are part of effective solutions and collaborations.

From the elements of your work, it looks as though you’re almost providing a hub organisation where you bring all of the elements of social change together — governments, the social sector itself, philanthropists and corporate donors, you do research. Is there a sense in which you are the node of the network, bringing them all together in demonstrative way and showing what’s out there and what they can do?

We try very hard to traverse traditional boundaries, and the world is moving in that direction anyway. Companies have to care about ESG, they have to care about the community, they have to care about stakeholders. Nobody talks about just shareholder value any more, it’s all stakeholder value. We use the term social delivery organisation, rather than non-profit, because it’s both non-profits and social enterprises and the notion that social delivery organisations are evolving. Governments are also changing and entering into more partnerships with the private sector and with the social sector. All of this demonstrates this change. We did a big study on public-private partnerships for social good to look at a number of different examples and say what the trends are. So the boundaries between the three legs of the stool, so to speak, are morphing anyway, and we see ourselves right in there, helping people to navigate that change.

In terms of the philanthropy sector in Asia, what do you think are the main needs? Are there legislative needs, are there ecosystem needs, is it just encouraging a culture of giving?

If you look at the Doing Good Index, the two economies that are consistently in the top cluster – though it’s not a league table like the Transparency International Index — are Singapore and Taiwan. Why? It is because the government in those two places sees the social sector, meaning, non-profits, social enterprise and philanthropy as really important partners to getting the job done. In all the other places, the government is a bit more wary — ‘who are these people? What do they want? They’re working in education, healthcare, we thought that was our role.’ So they give mixed messages which can enable and impede simultaneously. The impact of engagement by communities, by organisations, by philanthropists and how it can accelerate a solution is not well enough understood by governments. That’s where I think the needs are.

We talked earlier about CAPS 2.0, your ambition for the next few years. What would you need to get there?

You mean besides money?

Besides money… what will it entail in terms of staffing, in terms of your organisational development?

We’re building out our convening platform. We’re probably going to create a membership structure for part of what we do, not 100 per cent membership, but as a sustainable income stream and to get more people involved. In terms of people wanting us to study different things, it’s only our own bandwidth that is the impediment. We can only do so much because there’s so many interesting questions, there’s so many interesting answers out there that we can learn from. So, yes, obviously more money, more staff, more hours in the day. I don’t know if it’s true in the rest of the world, but in Asia, there’s more money for the social sector. AVPN has really taken off in the last 10 years and now we have the Asian Philanthropy Circle and the work of the Jockey Club in Hong Kong. In China, there are three different magazines only about philanthropy so this world is blossoming with a lot of thinking and talking and doing in our space. That is exciting, but it definitely changes things, too.

What do you look back on with most pride from CAPS setting up to where it is now? Would it be the fact that you, as you said earlier, you’re there and you’re established?

Sure. I think that we’ve really helped to build the discourse. There’s a number of confounding variables and we’re not the only ones, but I think we are getting people to think and producing really evidence-based research that gives them something to think about and react to that I hope is useful. It’s important to realize the potential of the private sector to be a constructive change agent. CAPS is the second pan-Asian, mission-driven organisation that I created; the first one was the Asia Business Council which is still flourishing. I have always believed that the private sector has a really important role to play through their company operations, through their sustainability, through their CSR, through the philanthropy of the owners. We’ve been very engaged in helping to realise all of that in a positive way.

I’d just add that, when it comes to being on the radar screen, I can take a lesson from AVPN. They’ve managed to build up their reputation quite quickly. We need to learn from that. For example, we have this really great micro-site attached to the Doing Good Index where you can compare countries, you can play with the data directly, you can compare countries, you can compare years. You can access it through the Doing Good Index site. I’m proud of that, but it doesn’t get enough attention.

Andrew Milner is Features Editor at Alliance magazine.

This interview is being shared free-to-read as a part of the Propel Philanthropy interview project. In addition to this article series, Propel Philanthropy collects stories demonstrating that modest grants can drive but results. You can learn more here.