Social Innovators of Tomorrow: Creating Inclusive and Sustainable Communities

Payal brings over 13 years of expertise in advancing gender and racial equity, and empowering marginalized and underrepresented communities in both India and Hong Kong. She actively supports and empowers youth-led initiatives and promotes learner-led approaches. She is the Senior Opportunity Fund Manager at Resolve Foundation, s88 charity with a mission to inspire, empower, and connect emerging leaders to foster a more inclusive Hong Kong.. Payal oversees the Opportunity Fund program, a seed-grant initiative aimed at supporting community changemakers who often face challenges in accessing the necessary resources to get their projects off the ground. Previously, she worked at a grassroots NGO that promotes inclusion of Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities, in different roles of community organizing, youth development, and policy advocacy. She advocates empowering people to realize their rights and giving them the opportunity to participate in society.

My Sustainability goals for 2024:

The changes I hope to see:
1) Increasing access to resources and opportunities for community changemakers through financial support and capacity building programs.
2) Building thriving communities through partnerships and collaboration between businesses, academic institutions, non-profits, and government.

Jennifer is a change-maker who believes Creating Shared Value (CSV) is the new business future. She drives the launch of Share for Good, Hong Kong’s first city-wide crowd donation platform born in just three weeks during the fifth- and the worst- wave of COVID-19. It has since become a s88 charity, partnering with 120 NGOs, to efficiently distribute much-needed supplies to those in need. Intertwining business mindset to the CSV mission of New World Group, she continues to drive various partnerships both in the business and charity landscapes, to address the most pressing societal needs in time.

Jennifer has nearly 20 years of experience in strategy and marketing, and has worked in Taiwan, Singapore, UK and Ethiopia being the regional head of property strategy at a listed conglomerate; head of strategy at a global apparel company; and various strategy roles in real estate, energy and communications industries.

My Sustainability Goals for 2024:

A sustainable community means tying business goals to social progress. Hong Kong is at its best position to leverage the assets of each organisation and to find the common grounds in achieving win-win ESG results. Our goal is to call for more partners in alleviating societal problems together in a more efficient manner.

Myles is the Founder & CEO of HelpBridge, an online business school and information sharing platform for Hong Kong’s 350,000 migrant domestic workers (MDWs).

A Filipino education entrepreneur, people professional, and community builder who was raised by a domestic worker in the Philippines since he was a child, Myles has empowered thousands of migrant workers to equip themselves with core skills to transform into small business entrepreneurs.

Initially started as a college project that connected domestic workers to charities online for free, HelpBridge has since grown into a community-based education platform that’s equipped over 2,500 migrant workers with core practical skills in entrepreneurship, IT literacy, and financial planning.

Myles has worked in strategy at Fortune 500 companies like BlackRock and JP Morgan, Kalibrr (the first Y Combinator startup in the Philippines), and Gobi Partners (one of Asia’s largest venture capital firms). Myles graduated First Class Honours (Summa Cum Laude) in Economics and Anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Sudesh Thevasenabathy brings with over 25 years of experience specialising in customer experience, process efficiencies and change management across multiple industries including telecommunications, consumer products, manufacturing, banking, healthcare tech, insurance and D&I in Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Sudesh is currently Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Asia at Manulife based in Hong Kong responsible for driving the DEI agenda across the region for employees and customers. At Manulife, Sudesh focusses his efforts on the workforce, workplace, community and the business to ensure inclusion is embedded across the organisation and beyond. He has received numerous awards in recognition of his work in the areas of customer experience and DEI across Asia.

Shifting his career towards his passion for inclusion, Sudesh won the 2019 Hong Kong Ally Award by Community Business and was named 2019 Global Top 50 OUTstanding Role Model (Involve.org) through his work on inclusion. Sudesh was recently named an honouree of the 2024 Diversity List by The Zubin Foundation to be considered for future government board participation. He is a true believer and advocate of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and with customers, and actively works and speaks in supporting inclusion of all forms be it disability, race, gender, sexuality and multi-generational employees in various forums around the world.

He recently helped Manulife win Best Diversity Initiative by Hong Kong Business Excellence Awards and Excellence in D&I by HKIHRM. He’s also council member of ESF’s Jockey Club Sarah Roe School in Hong Kong, Board Member of SENsational Foundation and Board Director of New Global Normal. Sudesh also jointly co-chairs the Inclusion Collective with South China Morning Post, and the Kwun Tong Collective.

Sudesh is an Electronics and Computing engineering graduate and is Six Sigma, Lean and Human Centered Design trained. A change agent at heart, he is passionate about delivering the best inclusive and sustainable experience possible for employees and customers at every level of any organisation.

My sustainability goals for 2024:

1. Promote inclusive workplaces by encouraging companies to adopt comprehensive DEI policies that foster a culture of inclusion
2. Enhance Educational Opportunities with focus on creating equitable access to quality education for all, particularly for underrepresented groups
3. Support Community Engagement and Representation by encouraging active participation and representation of all community members in decision-making process

Christine Vicera (she/hers) is a Hong Kong-raised Filipino researcher, educator and multidisciplinary artist. At the heart of her research and praxis lies a broader concern toward the relationship between Filipino migration and marginality within global racial capital.

Creative practice and community building are integral to her praxis. Sisig and Puchero (2021), her first documentary short was featured at the 2021 Southeast Asia x Seattle Film Festival. It follows the story of Julie Mangrobang, a former Filipino migrant domestic worker turned restaurant owner in HK, and explores how Filipino migrants contest and reshape their visibility in a multicultural, post-colonial HK, and enact their agency to create spaces for cultural and economic participation. In 2021, she co-founded be/longing an arts-for-education lab that harnesses the transformative power of storytelling and the creative arts to to co-create tools for anti-racist critical public pedagogy. Her research, poetry, and personal essays have been published in Kritika Kultura, Voice & Verse, Spill Stories, Asia Art Archive “Like A Fever,” and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.