Jenny Bowen thought her work was almost done. After 17 years of running OneSky (formerly known as Half the Sky), she had helped transform China’s child welfare institutions, and she could “see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
“We have lots of work left to do, but I can see where it’s going. So done, right? Mission accomplished.”
Or so she thought.
But then, she stepped back to reflect on her life while writing her memoir “Wish You Happy Forever: What China’s Orphans Taught Me About Moving Mountains,” and “now I am writing a whole different story…you just end up going from one to another.”
Thus is the life of a social entrepreneur, who “disrupt a status quo they see as sub-optimal,” according to Skoll Foundation President and CEO Sally Osberg.
Jenny’s new endeavor is called OneSky. Jenny shared a little about it at the Skoll World Forum this year:
“In rural China today, there are 61 million children who don’t live with their parents. They are left behind in big cities to help China become great worker nation to give us westerners the goods that we need. There’s a sacrifice.
I started thinking, I can’t change that problem. It’s inevitable that 23 million of those children are under 7 years old and only see their parents once a year. But maybe we could start working in those rural villages and talking to those factory owners and find some kind of synergy and bring a solution.
We have the government behind us at all levels. Nobody wants this to happen to these kids. We are starting a pilot project—there are 340,000 of these villages and we are starting in one county—for 3 years which will be evaluated by China Development Research Foundation and the Amsterdam Institute for Development, and hope it will be a model for China to roll out. [Read more about the exciting details here].
“What we do is so simple, we really can’t stop,” she said. “The journey is just beginning.”
Watch Jenny tell her complete story beginning at 31:57, and share a video about OneSky, above.
***After Jenny was done sharing her story, the audience was so inspired one thought about taking it to another country: “This model could work in Central America, with all the migrant workers’ children going to America,” he said.
