New book on Social Entrepreneurship in East Asia

Just found this new book which I thought might be of interest to our members.

The description below was recently posted by the Global Links Initiative.
http://www.glinet.eu/news/?p=506

"The book features ten stories that cover 13 social entrepreneurs. They came from very different backgrounds: ‘China Rabbit King’, REN Xuping, left school when he was just 14 years old because of poverty; the two young founders of Venture in Development, Marie and Carol, first got to know ‘social entrepreneurism’ at the Kennedy School in Harvard; the founders of Wu Qi Training School, 1kg More and Love Farms were once urban white-collar workers; LV Zhao (founder of NPI) and SHEN Dongshu (CEO of Fu Ping) were very successful businessmen before they decided to devote themselves to the nonprofit world.

However, these stories also reveal important commonalities. First, they all address some of the most crucial issues that a growing China now faces: income gaps and poverty, environment-friendly agriculture, education quality in rural and isolated areas, job training and livelihood support for migrant workers in the cities. Their approaches to solving these difficult problems are innovative and daring; they all are devoted to their work and are ready to learn from past failures to better prepare themselves for future success. Sustainability is their motto and they are good at mobilizing and regenerating resources just as the business world is. They pay a great deal of attention to cross-sector collaboration and networking. Most of the time they are like the ‘thousand-hand buddha’: they identify and motivate friends and partners in government, and business enterprises, donors and volunteers, and maximise the use of the resources that they can lay their hands on."

My question is this: while its obvious that we do have many social entrepreneurs out there doing some wonderful fieldwork in this region, how can we encourage those local leaders to help promote the spirit of civic engagement here on our group discussion board? Maybe the Changemakers platform administrators are waiting for us to rally that spirit for ourselves (what good would it be if they did all the work?) Anyways, for now I guess we can just read about social entrepreneurship in East Asia, and maybe someday we will actually have a few social entrepreneurs (based in East Asia) join up and start building our knowledge base with real first-hand experiences. I may post more information about my organization (Hope 81) in the future, but I really don't want this discussion board to become filled with my own experiences and personal views. Anyone out there want to contribute? Please feel free...

"Let us do our best, even if it gets us nowhere."
Henry Miller