Mr. Dao Feng He is originally from Yunnan, China. He was among the first college students to resume the entrance examination in 1977. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yunnan University and a master’s in economics from Fudan University, China. In the 1980s, he worked for China’s famous policy think tank—The Research Center For Rural Development of the State Council of China and was deeply involved in China’s rural land reform.

In 1989 he was politically punished. In 1992, he left the government and turned to business. He founded Sinoway Investment Corporation Limited and was the chairman until 2016. Beginning in 1997, he led Sinoway Co. to successively acquire more than a dozen bankrupt companies, such as Jiangsu Huayang Cement Factory, Kunming Kangfu Pharmaceutical Factory, Yunnan Jianshui Chemical Company, and Kunming Southwest Commercial Building. He transformed them into profitable enterprises for sale. In 2001, Sinoway Co. acquired the bankrupted Sinobright (Group) Co., Ltd, a listed company on the verge of bankruptcy and delisting. Its market value was only 300 million RMB when delisted and suspended. After 15 years of perseverance, Mr. He turned Sinobright from loss to profit and carried out a strategic restructuring of the company in 2014. When he resigned from the chairman and principal shareholder position in 2016, Sinobright’s market value had risen to 14 billion RMB. Mr. He also has many successful investment cases in the US biopharmaceutical industry.

During 1994-2000, Mr. He was invited to participate in the World Bank’s project of labor mobility from the poverty area to the Coast areas. He initiated and served as the director and founder of the Human Resources Development Center of Western China. In this project, Mr. He pioneered mobilizing 610,000 impoverished laborers from 61 poor counties of Western China to work at manufacturing factories in the eastern coastal regions.

In 1999, Mr. He was invited to join the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (CFPA) as a volunteer. He insisted on serving as a volunteer executive chairman in exchange for the reform of the organization from a government-operated non-government organization to an independent non-government organization. With his leadership, the CFPA developed to lead the philanthropic industry in China from several aspects, such as the effective management and innovation of charity projects, international aid, industry self-disciplining, microfinance poverty reduction, etc.

Mr. He co-founded the microfinance poverty alleviation project with the World Bank in 1996. He transformed it into a program when he took over CFPA in 1999; the program was gradually developed into CD Finance Co. LTD, which is well known as the best social enterprise in China. From 2011 to 2016, to make CD Finance more substantial and more significant, Mr. He invited the IFC of World Bank Group, Ant Financial, and Sequoia Capital as shareholders. He focused on building a rural financial service team and platform to make CD Finance grow to be the most significant social poverty alleviation enterprise in China. Before Mr. He’s departure from the board in 2018, the 5,000 employees of CD Finance annually provided approximately $2 billion US dollars of micro-loans and self-reliance improvement services to nearly 500,000 women in rural China.

He led CFPA for 17 years as an unpaid volunteer. He presided over the de-administrative reform of CFPA, reforming CFPA into the only de-administrative independent NGO in China with poverty alleviation and humanitarian aid projects in China and ten other countries. During his tenure from 1999 to 2015, CFPA’s fundraising grew from $2.5 million to over $90 million.

Mr. He also served as the China Foundation Center (CFC) chairman from 2014 to 2017. He collaborated with Mr. Yongguang Xui to build the CFC as a third-party information disclosure platform for China’s Foundations.

Mr. He has gradually resigned from the above positions since 2016, retired and moved to Maryland, United States, and started his leisure, reading, and writing life. In 2016, he founded a family charitable foundation, “Dao Feng & Angela Foundation (formerly known as Daofeng & Angela Foundation),” and started his new life journey in non-profit organization leadership training, international cooperation, and root preservation for universal values.

In 2014, Mr. He received the Olga Alexeeva Memorial Prize for developing philanthropy for progressive social change. In 2019, Mr. He received the President’s Volunteer Service Award from the White House for his outstanding service to fellow Americans and those most in need. The same year, Mr. He received three more awards, including the United Nations NGO/Department of Public Information’s Outstanding Achievement Award for International Alleviation, the Global Outstanding Social Entrepreneur Award at the Global Corporate Social Responsibility Summit in New York, and the International Leadership Foundation’s Leadership Award in Washington, DC.