Inflight Magazine of Bangkok Airways

HANDS ON HUMANITY

PETER MYERS IS INSPIRED BY BUSINESS MAVEN AND SOCIAL-WELFARE WONDER WOMAN CLAIRE CHIANG

SOME PEOPLE READING THIS WILL HAVE BEEN LUCKY enough to stay at a Banyan Tree hotel or resort across the region – perhaps in the Maldives, in Bangkok, Phuket, or in Luang Prabang. All luxury accommodations, the Banyan Tree brand has become well-known for establishing in each of its destinations a sense of place through Asian traditions and design, as well as employing every environmentally sensitive operational process you can think of.

Moving into merchandising, the group set up Banyan Tree Gallery in 1996 to support local communities by showing and selling indigenous handicrafts of the kind that many visitors ecstatically flll their homes with. Taking things a step further, this year Banyan Tree Global Foundation was launched to safeguard the corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds and projects undertaken by the company.

The subject of this proflle heads up these utopian-like ventures. And when we met, in the museum shop by Banyan Tree at Singapore’s impressive Asian Civilisations Museum, I was eager to get the story behind both of them – but, more importantly, the story of Claire Chiang, the sociologist turned retail-and-resort maven, vocal proponent of sustainable and compassionate capitalism. Oh, and somewhere in between, a member of parliament and chairman of more social and environmental-welfare-related boards than there’s room to mention here.

When you flnish this article, you may believe, as I do, that you’ve been reading about one of the more enlightened movers and shakers of our time.

It was a regular sort of week for Chiang. Over the last three days she had launched a revamped Shirin Fozdar Trust Fund – which focuses on women’s issues and social enterprises – and had spoken at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, telling graduates there is more to the world than banking. That afternoon she had spoken at an APEC meeting, and the following day she would launch a fund by Wildlife Reserves Singapore for rainforest and biodiversity conservation.

“Everything I do is connected to empowering families and looking at how else we can look at sustainability for revenue generation, or for scholarship and education,” says Chiang. “My work is no longer about charity or social welfare, it’s about professionalising social services, empowering women at work, marketing their products, learning new ways of cutting the pie.”

Chiang’s retail venture can be traced to the late 80s, when she met Shirin Fozdar, a pioneer of women’s rights who was then flghting prostitution in Yasothon in the north east of Thailand. In the process of accessorising Laguna Phuket, Chiang was introduced by Foster to the maun triangle cushions of which Thailand is famous. She quickly realised that, rather than just decorating the hotel with indigenous interior designs, she could retail it.

Soon afterwards, on a trip to Hanoi for an ASEAN Handicraft Promotion and Development Association meet, it became obvious to Chiang that craft production was alive and well among women in indigenous communities, but that no one was marketing them. Middlemen were siphoning off all their proflts and they lacked technology.

“I saw the connection between business and community,” says Chiang. “I’ve since visited all these villages; it’s a wonderful experience. People are doing their level best. Their life is integrated – family, work, marriage, work, life. Mentally and intellectually, I think they’ve got it. Educated city people hardly see their children, rarely have a meal together. I’m not sure we’ve got it; we’ve taken it too far.” Suffice to say, the Chiang family is very close, meeting regularly despite being spread across South-East Asia.

Soon Chiang’s vision for the galleries was fully formed, a platform for trading and for cross-cultural understanding. It was the ultimate CSR extension for the hotel group, to market, to educate, and to bring market intelligence to the villagers. The momentum gathered and Chiang the sociology tutor became Chiang the full-time retailer. There are now 70 shops in 27 countries, with another 30 in the pipeline.

It hasn’t been easy and it’s no wonder there are no direct competitors – business plans requiring short-term proflts don’t work in the craft development game, dealing with villagers who don’t have email, material, design ideas or market intelligence, where each visit takes weeks of planning, where one must return again and again to show villagers new drafts, new colours.

Fortunately, Banyan Tree has the infrastructure to sustain this. And to set this long-term thinking in stone, this year’s Banyan Tree Global Foundation came into being. Chiang explains: “CSR is still seen as an extra; something you do when you have money and you are making a profit. True, bottom lines are important, but if there is a policy to set aside something small or big, and there is actually a value proposition adopted, that is a commitment that no subsequent vice-president or manager can shift. It’s embedded.”

Asked which product from the galleries she favours; Chiang smiles nostalgically: “My grandmother was a rubber tapper, but also a weaver. I’d go with her to the backstreets of Singapore to flnd the hard rubber strips that tie up crates – and she’d weave them into baskets. So when I see baskets, I think family, I think women, I think usefulness.”

In the Museum Shop in Singapore, Mooser baskets made by hill-tribe women in northern Thailand have pride of place. Their traditional craft was reinvented after Chiang introduced Alaskan weaving patterns to the Mooser women: “I feel that there is a universal language for crafts and for women, and yet the groups producing them never meet.” What could have been simply an interesting anthropological flnding was turned into reality – the Mooser has since incorporated the multicoloured basketry style of the Inuit into their work.

And we are now getting to the crux of what Claire Chiang is all about. Here is a woman who travels the world searching for universal values. She talks of ‘the wellspring of humanity’, and recalls another realisation at one of the myriad women’s conferences she has attended: “You see the connection of women of all colours in one instance; there’s something in our genes, in our experience, in the things we wear, the things we like – that goes back to our origins – and I feel that if we all dig deep in our wells, we’ll all flnd the same riverbed, our humanity.”

It was now my turn to dig deeper. I wanted to flnd where Chiang’s thinking flrst developed. I knew that she had a relatively hard-up childhood – was this, I wondered, integral to the woman Chiang became?

“I grew up in a two-room apartment with 10 people living in it. It was an economy of scarcity, but we never felt poor. We made do with what we had. The notion of recycling was therefore endemic.”

Chiang’s mother reminded her years later that even at the age of three, she would collect pencils from her flve older brothers, sharpen them, and use them until they were too small to hold, and even then would try and flnd something to fit them on to. She had little pocket money; her mother would give her a small sum from which Chiang had to pay for transportation, books and clothes.

“I would search for stock fabrics at bazaars, with which I could express myself. I’d then plead with a local tailor, and ask them to make outfits that I’d designed.”

This youthful tenacity was obviously extended into later life. “My worldview is very concentric,” Chiang told me. “Everything starts with me: I do it; I get it. I don’t do it; nothing happens. No one owes me a living. I have to knock on the door, present, see what I can get. Next is my family. They, in turn, do work for the community. The community in cohesion builds the country. And each country does work for its people, and empowers the individual – that is world order. This, of course, is the ancient wisdom of Confucius.”

In a book Chiang co-authored in 1994, Stepping Out: The Making of Chinese Entrepreneurs, she interviewed 47 Singaporean pioneers from various fields. From 4,500 pages of transcripts, the same two Chinese words kept popping up. One is zuo, which means work; the other is ke ku (suffering). Chiang’s never-say-die generation believed, as she obviously does, that if you stay in the race long enough, something good will happen.

There’s still much to do, more galleries to start, new hotels to open in China and further afield, and, perhaps more importantly, more convergence to achieve across all her spheres of influence. On this point, I’ll give Claire Chiang the last words:

“I’m really a volunteer at the edge. I’m both at the edge of business, and in business, in social services and at the edge of social services. There is a lot of talent out there, but who will connect the dots? People at my level can do that – by referrals, by partnership models, by leading or mentoring associates to see things that way.” n

Visit www.banyantreegallery.com to flnd your nearest Banyan Tree Gallery. More information about Banyan Tree initiatives can be found at www.banyantree.com/csr