Story of the Book
VCCorp is one of Vietnam’s leading media technology companies, with 2,500 employees and a portfolio of initiatives that includes the WeChoice Award, the Better Choice Award, and the Human Act Prize. When VCCorp approached Metro Writers to produce a book alongside the Human Act Prize, the brief was to create a rigorous, analytically grounded account of Vietnamese social impact that could stand as a reference work in its own right, while also creating a platform to amplify the Prize and its participants to an international audience.
The case for the book rested on a principle that both parties understood: print carries weight that digital media cannot replicate. For VCCorp as a media company, a well-researched book amplifies the Prize’s authority, extends its reach beyond the annual event cycle, and communicates the value of social impact work in a form that travels internationally and persists indefinitely. For the social impact sector in Vietnam, it creates a permanent record of the field’s foundations, frameworks, and breakthrough practitioners that policymakers, investors, and practitioners anywhere in the world can read and act on.
Metro Writers assembled a team of seven journalists with backgrounds in business, technology, social impact, finance, and international reporting under the editorial direction of Michael Arnold and Trần Mai Anh, with overall editorial guidance from Nhân Dân Editor-in-Chief Lê Quốc Minh, who also wrote the book’s introduction. The book draws directly on the 35 projects shortlisted across all categories of the Human Act Prize 2023, using them as case studies to build a comprehensive analytical framework covering the foundations, theories, challenges, and future directions of Vietnamese social impact practice.
The Vietnamese edition was produced by TTS Alphabooks and published by Thế Giới Publishers. The English edition is distributed internationally through Amazon. The full text is available to read online at humanactprize.org.
Pioneers in Ethics demonstrates what a book can do that even an awards ceremony cannot: it converts a single night’s recognition into a permanent, internationally accessible reference for a field that Vietnam is leading.
