We are thrilled to announce the launch of Nanjing Connect, the creation of the inaugural winning team of the Hassenfeld Social Enterprise Fund Competition. Nanjing Connect is a website featuring regular bilingual articles in both Chinese and English focused on issues faced by Sino-global small- and medium-sized enterprises doing business in China. The project team comprised a total of seven students from the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, including four international students and three Chinese students. Their work embodies the deep cross-cultural collaboration unique to the Center, and it represents the innovative ways the Center and its community, with the generous support of the Hassenfeld Family Foundation, continue to bring knowledge to the world.
We hope you will explore Nanjing Connect here and provide comments to the team here as they continue to enhance it.
About the Hassenfeld Social Enterprise Fund Competition
The Hassenfeld Family Foundation funded the Hassenfeld Social Enterprise Fund Competition in 2011 with a portion of its $2.2 million gift to The Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The Competition’s objective is to stimulate student development and implementation of innovative projects with concrete deliverables that address social needs or problems. Each year, teams of four to six students submit project proposals aiming to satisfy specific criteria such as creating working, impactful partnerships among Chinese and international students at the Center; finding an environmental, social, and/or intercultural need that Center students are uniquely positioned to address; and developing a scalable product. The winning team receives prize funding, with which they make their proposal a reality. In the process, they wrestle with real-world business problems and build a set of skills and a tangible creation that will continue to serve them and grow long after they leave the Center.
