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Hua Dan




Caroline Watson
Found and Director

About Caroline Watson

About Caroline Watson

Caroline set up Hua Dan in 2004 and has spearheaded Hua Dan's inception and development, including but not limited to project management, organizational development, strategy and vision, fund-raising, marketing and communications, and HR. As a pioneer of arts-based approaches to social change, Caroline has lead the organization through its first seven years of growth and is committed to growing an organization that has a scalable and replicable international model. Caroline has received numerous awards for her work with Hua Dan. She was recently nominated a Young Global Leader as part of the 2011 World Economic Forum. She was selected as an Architect of the Future at the 2007 Waldzell Meeting and was a 2010 Paragon Fellow, a fellowship offered by the Foundation for Youth Social Entrepreneurship.



Country:  China
Region:  Asia

Mission:  

Hua Dan is a non-profit organization dedicated to using theater to inspire the full potential in people. Hua Dan seeks to help people lead their own lives and their communities with courage, confidence and creativity.


Sector:  Multiple
Year Founded:  2004
Website:  www.hua-dan.org

Description:  

Hua Dan is China's first and only social enterprise dedicated to using theater as a tool for personal and social change. We have a particular focus on working with migrant workers, individuals at the intersection of the mass rural to urban migration spurred on by China's economic development.

We have developed a model for training and employing these migrant workers to deliver theater programs in their communities with other workers and children to build soft skills and educate participants on key issues related to their personal and professional well-being. We are looking to apply our products and services at a government and policy level, to integrate creative learning methodologies into the Chinese national curriculum.

We have also developed a model to scale our work into other communities, by identifying promising leaders in under-served communities to be micro-franchisees of the Hua Dan model.

You can see more about Scheherazade, the umbrella organization we have established to do this at: http://scheherazade-initiatives.com/foundation/about-foundation/


Social Impact:  

Since inception we have trained over 10 migrant workers to implement programs and workshops with over 23,000 people across China. We have been the recipient of many awards for our work, including the British Council Social Entrepreneurs Award, Foundation for Youth Social Entrerpreneurship and our founder, Caroline Watson, is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.

We are seeking to extend our impact in China, as well as to apply the model of training under-served groups to use theater as a tool for social change in their communities in other emerging markets, such as India, South America and Africa.



Hua Dan