A sustainable business helping the rural community in Cambodia

A 25-year-old native of Xinjiang, Kurt Xu first visited Cambodia three years ago. That experience, as a volunteer at an organic farm in the rural Siem Reap province, was pivotal as he pondered his career options after graduating from university in Beijing. A year later, he returned to the Southeast Asian country as one of the founders of Green Leaders Adventure (GLA), an education-focused company he set up with his modest savings and 90,000 yuan (HK$114,000) borrowed from his family. To date, GLA has brought 27 teams of as many as 30 young people - mostly from the mainland and Hong Kong, but also as far away as the United States and Britain - to spend their summer or winter vacations as volunteers for projects to improve infrastructure and other facilities in impoverished rural communities. Xu says he is living his dream of running a sustainable business that benefits society.

In October 2010, after graduating from the University of International Relations in Beijing, I had a few career options: I could apply for a well-paid corporate job, run a family business or start my own company. But I didn't find anything exciting enough to sustain my interest until I visited Cambodia with a professor from Taiwan, who was spending his retirement on projects improving the soil fertility of farmland in developing countries. I grabbed a shovel and hoe, gathered cow manure and worked in the fields under the burning sun for the first time in my life. One day, exhausted after days of heavy work, I fell asleep under a tree near the house of a rural family we had been helping. A widow from the family, grateful for the help she had received, asked her son to catch some fish from the pond, which she cooked for me. The woman's husband had died only three months earlier after being bitten by a snake while fishing. I was deeply touched by the way local people expressed their gratitude to strangers who just offered a little help to them. It changed my perspective on life. The next year, I returned to Cambodia.

I founded Green Leaders Adventure with a few friends. It's an institution that offers educational programmes for teenage students from abroad to participate in volunteer projects in rural Cambodia. The projects range from renovating schools to building houses and bridges. The students, aged from 14 to 20, get involved in the early stage of each project so they can see first-hand the impact of their actions on society. Working with the poor helps shape their values and outlook on life before they go to university. I want the programmes to add to their formal education. The feedback we get varies greatly but they all fall in love with Cambodia and hope to visit again.