Special Edition #3: The Social Enterprise Club
How We Started With a Compost Machine
For any students or educators interested in social entrepreneurship and sustainability
Junlin Yang
The Social Enterprise Club is one of my favorite parts of school every week, because it has grown into something much bigger than I expected when I first joined.
It actually started with a compost machine.
A couple years ago, a group of students, the same age as we are now, noticed how much food waste our school produced and came up with the idea of turning it into compost. They proposed the project directly to our school principals and asked the school to help fund a compost machine. The principals agreed, gave the club the funding, and suddenly their idea became something we could actually make happen on campus.
Through our “Waste to Wonder” initiative, where we made the compost machine work as part of the club, we even won the Sustainability Award at the China Schools Awards by the British Chamber of Commerce!
The original goal was pretty simple: they wanted to reduce food waste from our school canteen, turn it into compost, and find ways to make sustainability feel more practical around campus. They started by selling compost bags, then slowly moved into other products and ideas.
I joined through invitation at the start of Year 12, and my first project was our handmade soap. I was in the purchasing department, which meant I helped the sales department brainstorm product ideas and bought all the supplies we needed by learning how to use 1688 (Alibaba). I actually only knew about this app through SEC, and I found out how much cheaper supplies were there compared with Taobao. Great tip for anyone making anything from scratch!
Then came the much more fun part, making all the soap together and figuring out how we wanted to package and advertise it for the Winter Fair.
This project was when I really started to like how the club worked. Before we even came up with the soap idea, we had almost 15 different project ideas written on the whiteboard tables. After rounds of research on materials and weighing the best product to sell to a broad audience, we finally chose handmade soap.
The Winter Fair is one of the biggest events at school, and I had a lot of fun explaining how we made our soaps and the mission of our CCA.
After the Year 13s graduated, I was elected CEO, and the first project I led was probably my favorite so far, our coffee-ground products!
This project took A LOT more experimenting than the soap. We collected used coffee grounds from around school and Starbucks, researched how we could reuse them, tested molds and AB glue, and made every single product ourselves from scratch. There were a lot of afternoons when club time had technically ended but a bunch of us were still sitting together making more because we knew we needed enough stock for Founder’s Day.
The process got messy, but it was worth it in the end because…
We sold out!
Founder’s Day was probably one of my favorite moments involving the club, especially after knowing exactly how many hours had gone into making everything. This was a product we had developed ourselves, and the very first product I had led as CEO!
Our club also has separate departments for marketing, design, sales, purchasing, and tech, and every department has its own responsibilities. In reality, though, everyone gets involved once we have a big project coming up. We decide what to sell together, help each other when one department has too much to do, and if something needs to be handmade, most of us end up making it together anyway.
Over the years, the club has experimented with compost bags, tote bags, mini Christmas trees, handmade soap, coffee-ground products, and plenty of other ideas. Some work immediately, and some require a lot more trial and error before we would ever put them on a stall. For example, for the coffee-ground products, we did a lot of research and went through failed trials to learn how to actually make the molds work.
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We have always been lending all of our profits through Kiva, a microfinance platform, to support women entrepreneurs in lower-income communities around the world. So far, we have loaned out more than $3,000 and made 15+ loans!
We all love being able to choose borrowers from Kiva and read about their stories before loaning out our profits. Many of our loans help women buy livestock, fabric, palm oil, or other materials they need to run their small businesses. Once the loan is repaid, we lend that money again, so the same money can keep moving from one entrepreneur to another.
To all of our club members, the Social Enterprise Club now feels like a small family. We have spent so many afternoons brainstorming, making products, preparing for fairs, fixing things that did not work, and staying late to finish something that everyone has become really close.
We are now starting the first term of another school year, and this year we want to bring the club back to where it began by incorporating compost into our products again. We also hope to submit for the China Schools Sustainability Award again, this time showing how the original compost project has continued to develop through the club. I will post an update on what product we decided to go with this year soon as well!
For students across the world who are interested in sustainability, global citizenship, or social entrepreneurship, I think this is such a fun model you could try as a passion project or even at your own school! :D
