What is SIE Fund

The Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Fund (SIE Fund), as a catalyst for social innovation in Hong Kong, connects our community with different sectors, including businesses, NGOs, academics and philanthropies to create social impact through innovative solutions that address poverty and social exclusion. Partly through the intermediaries, the Fund provides visionary individuals and organisations with diverse resources in support of research, capacity building and the entire life cycle of innovative ventures, from idea incubation and seed funding to implementation and eventual scale-up. The ultimate goal is to foster an ecosystem where social entrepreneurs can thrive and innovative ideas, products and services can benefit society by meeting underserved needs, unleashing underutilised talents, promoting social inclusion, as well as enhancing the well-being and cohesion of the society.

The objectives of the SIE Fund are –

To establish or support schemes and experiments with a view to attracting, inspiring or nurturing social entrepreneurship to develop innovations that aim at creating social impact and build social capital for supporting poverty relief in Hong Kong.

The SIE Fund intends to benefit members of the public in Hong Kong who are generally residents of Hong Kong without conditions of stay and in need of assistance in poverty alleviation and prevention of social exclusion such as the elderly, children and youth, persons with disabilities, people of diverse race, single-parent families, new arrivals, low income families, and other segments of the community in Hong Kong with limited access to education and opportunities. The aim is to bring hope, dignity and self-worth through providing them with appropriate services/products.

The operation of the SIE Fund will be guided by the following principles –

1. social innovation is the focus, not social enterprise per se;
2. the scope of the Fund should remain flexible for more effective delivery of results in the light of actual experience;
3. focus on innovative ideas to alleviate and prevent poverty;
4. risk assessment is important while promoting innovation so as to maintain the prudent use of public money; and
5. no overlapping with other existing public funding.
    

Through the intermediaries' programme, the SIE Fund will distribute funding on Innovative Programmes and related Capacity Building programmes which are targeted to nurture the social entrepreneurs and their ventures. Separately, the SIE Fund may directly fund flagship projects which are of major public concern and have greater social impacts, and for areas of unmet demands and service gaps where there is a need for greater coordination and collaboration to achieve results.
Funding will typically be in the form of grants for innovative ventures of different development stages (idea generation, prototyping, start-up or scale-up). The SIE Fund Task Force is also exploring new funding modes such as equity investment, loan guarantee and pay-for-success (aka social impact bond) to meet different funding requirements of social entrepreneurs and facilitate the development of the social impact investment ecosystem.
The SIE Fund welcomes the community to submit proposals. All proposals received will be handled by the Task Force Secretariat according to the established mechanisms. Those falling within the scope of the intermediary programmes will be referred to the relevant intermediaries for consideration. (For enquiries, please contact the SIE Fund Task Force Secretariat.)