Motivational speaker Jane Chen views the world through a lens of beauty and because of it, she has saved thousands of lives. After years of working in developing countries with nonprofit organizations focused on easing the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, Chen had seen some horrible things.
She committed her life to helping others and that meant entering a world of hardship. She felt it waring on her and she felt herself sinking, so she made a choice.
She chose to find beauty in the world and while she still encountered terrible things, she began focusing on the good in it all. What she found while working with premature babies in developing countries was that a mother’s love and devotion to her child is a universally unbreakable bond and a deeply beautiful thing.
This beauty led her to co-found a social enterprise called Embrace Innovations that provided developing countries with low-cost, easy-to-use incubator technology that is necessary for keeping premature babies alive and developing correctly.
Because of her innovative work, she was chosen as Forbes’ Impact 30 and Town and Country’s 50 biggest philanthropists. She has received the Fast Company Design Award for her unique and philanthropic company structure and the Economist Innovation Award, as well as the Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year. Chen was also chosen to serve as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.
Most recently, Chen expanded Embrace Innovations into a baby products line, Little Lotus Baby, for the US market in which it uses the incubation technology in household blankets to help children sleep better. These baby products are proven to help children sleep up to an hour more due to a consistency in body temperature. For every Little Lotus Baby product sold an Embrace baby warmer is donated to a developing country.
Chen believes this sustainable model allows parents to be part of a global community and harness that original beauty she was captivated with.
“When a woman becomes a mother something inside of her changes and she feels for children and mothers everywhere,” said Chen. She sees her buy-one-donate-one model as an opportunity for parents to help parents who never would have been brought together otherwise.
Chen isn’t stopping with her own humanity project. With so many life-saving technologies that are unavailable to the developing world, she hopes that more innovators will examine their purpose and fulfillment and chose to shift towards localizing technologies. She uses her innovative business speaking to spread her message of doing good to do well in the business world. In her keynote address, she guides her audience through ways to focus their innovation on helping others.
When we choose to see beauty in the world, we end up creating more.
