GOTOCO

GOTOCO/ Richard Lloyd

Gotoco China runs an award-winning summer camp cultural exchange programme, giving university students from the ‘West’ a completely free and funded opportunity to visit China for summer camp cultural exchange and work-travel placements. Similar to AIESEC but focused purely on China and cultural exchange, Gotoco’s project has been recognised by the United Nations and British Chamber of Commerce in China in their recent China Social Impact Awards for their contributions to Community and Culture. 1,500 students have joined Gotoco programmes so far and the number for 2020 intake is expected to be 1,000. The programme was established by two Fung scholars and a friend they met during their Fung foundation-funded year of study at Peking University. Please find a Q&A with their co-founder, Richard Lloyd, (FS12/13, 15/16, University of Oxford), below.

Danny and I both benefited from Fung Scholarship in 2012-13 when we studied at Peking University as part of our undergraduate Chinese Studies course at the University of Oxford. The financial support from the Foundation on our year abroad allowed us to save up enough capital to cover the basic costs of our initial website, marketing costs and programme administration, as well as giving us the capacity to travel and explore China. The Fung Foundation has since continued to play a very important part in helping us to become established. For example, many Oxford University participants on our programme have been granted generous funding by the Foundation to enable them to really make the most of their time in China.

Since we graduated in 2015, we have been able to develop our own start-up social enterprise even further in close collaboration with our Chinese friend and partner, Lisha Tang, after meeting on our year abroad. As Gotoco, we have now arranged for over 1,500 North American and European university students to join fun, funded and free work-travel and cultural exchange projects all around China.

We are pleased to be able to keep engaging with the Fung Scholars community to increase access to programmes in China and to improve understanding about China around the world.

The name refers to our aspiration to be the go-to (an expert in something!) for students wishing to explore somewhere while gaining qualifications. Currently, that ‘somewhere’ is China, but we hope to offer work-travel trips to a range of destinations over the coming years. For our first few weeks, we were simply called Go-to but it turned out to be a terrible name for Google SEO—common words as company names make for something that is “ungoogleable”. We quickly realised we needed a proper name, so appended ‘co’ (for ‘company’ or ‘cooperation’) to Goto and so Gotoco was born!

We are the only organisation able to offer these programmes to students free of charge, while also offering a fully-funded TEFL (Teaching of English as a Foreign Language) certificate, free room and board, and a week-long trip to a mountain town, Yangshuo, near the Vietnamese border, at the end. We actually started because all other similar trips charged students huge fees on top of flights and visas and we wanted to make work-travel more accessible. We continue to support the Fung Foundation’s mission by providing internships to students with scholarships from the University of Oxford. We are also developing more and more partnerships with other universities to offer funding support to our participants, such as Cardiff University, UW Madison, and UCL.

In 2019, we’ve been proud to receive recognition for our team’s summer camp programmes following several years of hard work to make our trips as fun, valuable, affordable and sustainable as possible. Gotoco has been recognised for our efforts in Community and Culture by the UN and the British Chamber of Commerce in China at the China Social Impact Awards 2019 (http://www.socialimpactawards.cn/). We are also very excited to have been awarded the bronze award for Best Education Product at the British Youth Travel Awards 2019, for our TEFL and China education initiatives (https://www.britishyouthtravelawards.c om/winners-educational/).

Question 2: Tell us more about Gotoco, what makes your programme special? What’s the name about?

Question 3: How did you get the idea to do this exciting initiative? And how did you make those difficult first steps to get started?

Our desire to start Gotoco and work on people-to-people cultural exchange started during our year abroad at Peking University in 2012-13. Fung funding allowed us to use our time in China to the full—taking Mandarin lessons, travelling and exploring as much as possible, instead of having to focus on earning enough money to survive. This freedom to engage in diverse hobbies and meet as many people as possible fostered a strong interest in local culture and in making immersive cultural exchange programmes accessible to more students.

Upon graduation, we had no hesitation

in returning to China and joined together to found and grow Gotoco, building on the work Danny had done during his time at Oxford to set up summer camp programmes in Yangshuo, Guangxi in South China.

Learning from the importance of maintaining diverse interests, and because we were just starting out, Danny enrolled in an MBA at Tsinghua University (before also completing a Master’s in Sinology at SOAS and studying in Hong Kong), while Richard worked as an analyst and then research manager for China Policy, a policy advisory company in Beijing. Pursuing other interests while starting Gotoco allowed us to learn much more about living, studying and working in China, while also developing our skills and networks and providing an income to sustain us while we got our business off the ground.

We believe it’s important to keep ourselves on our toes and get involved in various projects to gain new inspiration, perspectives, and insights on how to develop our own social enterprise. Our diversity of interests and activities has also allowed us to be patient and grow the company organically with no outside investment and sticking to our core values in offering meaningful, engaging, and funded cultural exchange adventures.

We believe in being engaged with our community.

Besides the usual activities we undertake to stay on the ball in the China camps and cultural exchange sector, we also do our best to contribute to activities we support in Beijing, where we spend plenty of time. In the community, our team takes active roles supporting local initiatives such as the Royal Asiatic Society and Young China Watchers. Danny recently even took on a part-time role as the EU-China Literature Festival’s press relations manager, while in the UK I’ve joined the board of Insight Outreach, a charity focused on increasing access to universities for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Question 5: What’s it like working across quite different cultural boundaries? How do you manage culturally diverse teams with different expectations?

Working across cultures and borders has provided plenty of challenges, and we’ve been very lucky to partner with our friend Lisha Tang, whom we met on our year abroad in Beijing. Working with Lisha has allowed the three of us to maximise our differing skills and bring divergent perspectives to ensure the work we’re doing meets our clients and participants’ needs and expectations in China as well as in North America and Europe, while remaining compliant in different jurisdictions. This has been further heightened by bringing in strong team members with new skills and the right attitude as we’ve grown to help us keep achieving our goals in creating excellent work-travel and cultural exchange programmes.

Question 6: What value has been most important to the success of your company?

Patience has been the key for us, as growing an international start-up with no prior business experience has meant long hours, many small setbacks and plenty of learning. There is no right answer on how to grow a fulfilling, successful project and you have to be ready constantly for dents to your confidence, re-alignment of your expectations, and unexpected new challenges. We have made plenty of mistakes along the way as we’ve tried to gauge what kind of people we need on our team, how to focus our time, what culture our office should have, and how to best engage with all of our Gotoco’ers. What we’ve had to realise as we’ve grown is that there is no point at which you can say you’ve made it, and we need to enjoy any small moments of achievement, especially happy feedback from Gotoco’ers, and not let the minor setbacks consume our lives, as running your own project can so easily do.

Question 7: What are your plans for the future?

Now that we have been operating for several years and are more sustainable, we’re excited to start new projects over the coming year. We are working with our alumni network, which includes many Fung Scholars, to provide more career development pathways in education, non-profits and China-related careers. This year, we are focussing on developing synergies through partnerships with a variety of really important organisations. We have begun a partnership with Insight Outreach this year (disclosure: I am delighted to have become part of their board), a charity focused on university outreach, to allow our alumni to develop their skills further while supporting underprivileged school children in the UK to apply to top universities. Their flagship programme, the Oxford Mentorship Scheme, aimed to help students from underperforming state schools get into Oxford—in the last intake about 50% of their mentees got in, which is greatly beyond the national average for those schools. We are also initiating a collaboration with SupChina to bring our alumni into a large global community of China-watchers. In China, we’re delighted to be working with the Confucius Institute to create more cultural exchange projects, while also aiming to develop new local government projects to make programmes more accessible to rural children, using curricula that we have developed in-house.

Further to this, we are currently developing a new China intro course with our Professor from when we studied at Oxford. This will be an in-depth but accessible course about Chinese history, society and culture to give students a lens through which to view China when they come here in the summer. We want to give everyone coming with us a good grounding in understanding China so that they can make the most of their time here, and pierce through some common misconceptions. We will welcome over 1,000 university students to China in summer 2020, and we want to ensure that everyone has as enriching and fun an experience as possible and can become part of a large network of like-minded China watchers on their return home.

Question 8: Thanks very much for your comments today, do you have any final words to say about your time with the Fung Foundation?

We’re still very grateful for the base that the Fung Scholarship gave us on our year abroad, and hope that our projects help indirectly to further the Foundation’s goals. My colleague Danny was delighted to meet with the Foundation’s leadership earlier this month in Hong Kong to discuss ways to contribute more to the community of scholars in the UK; we are excited about various ventures that could contribute to this goal, so watch this space! We’re always very pleased to engage with the community and hope that we’ll have the opportunity to collaborate with more Fung Scholars over the coming years. We’re also considering launching an incubator for promising social enterprise start-ups for the summer vacation 2020, and welcome applications from Fung Scholars around the world!