OurCityLove Social Enterprise
Using wisdom and technology to create an accessible city.
Enterprise/business philosophy and objectives of the founder
Accessibility is an emerging issue in most Asian cities, especially facing the aging challenges. Since it takes time and money to make the city to be 100% accessible, giving the seniors, the disabled and their families (around 400 million), the accurate, reliable and user-friendly accessibility information service is definitely a huge market.
With the vision of “using wisdom and technology to fulfill love”, OurCityLove Social Enterprise provides companionship, encouragement, training and employment to people with disabilities. By training and co-working with 388+ contracted disabled fellows, the OurCityLove built up the “Friendly City Cloud” with various IoT in-built mobile apps and web services so that the “inconvenient” customers could easily find out the accessibility services of shopping mall, museum, transportation, stations and restaurants & hotels in the city.
History of development/business model
OurCityLove Social Enterprise originated from a course run by Chong Wey Lin that integrated service learning and problem-oriented innovation at National Chiao Tung University in 2012, in which he led his students to solve problems related to accessible information services together with a team of people with disabilities.
In 2014, OurCityLove Social Enterprise was formally established. Working together with people with disabilities, it has developed various cloud and mobile applications that provide information, consulting, training and certification courses to friendly service providers in all different fields. Through B2B/B2G Technology Building and Licensing, Service Rental, Consulting, Training and Awarding, the OurCitLove’s EPS are NT$2.9 (2014), NT$4.2 (2015) and NT$3.5 (2016) audited by KPMG Taiwan. The revenues 2016 are 20% B2G, 70% B2B, 10% B2NGO and OurCityLove donates annually 50% of net profits for its social mission and communication.
Creating social value/mitigating social problems
Since 2014, the OurCityLove Social Enterprise has launched Friendly Apps in 12 Taiwan major cities and has licensed our technology to Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. With adequate technology and assistive supports, the OurCityLove disabled fellows, the “Friendly Surveyors”, collect various accessibility information of our cities for the obvious fact that no one knows the needs of accessibility better than they do. The licensed “Friendly Consultants” have also hosted hundreds of training courses for business owners and staffs and had successfully motivated and helped 1000+ restaurants to improve their accessible environment and friendly service quality.
It is clear that, through the positive social participation of OurCityLove’s disabled fellows, the traditional “those who need help” dramatically become “those who can help” in this social enterprise. OurCityLove tries to prove the world that the PWDs are NOT persons with “disabilities”, but “Citizens with Very Different Abilities.” OurCityLove’s achievement demonstrates a continuous and self-sustainable effort for public, private and non-profit partners to create an even better accessible and friendly environment in the rapidly aging societies around the world.
Contact them
1F, Nr.57, Lane 167, Dongnan St. 30062, HsinChu City, Taiwan (R.O.C.)